Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by Anthony Bellotti.
Following years of our efforts, President Donald J. Trump’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya recently took to the airwaves and announced, “We got rid of all the beagle experiments on NIH campus.” It’s a long-awaited “Amen” moment for the millions of Americans like us disgusted by the government’s taxpayer-funded canine cruelty.
In President Trump’s first term, the government’s largest cat experimentation lab, which was located at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was shut down. And it put the Department of Veterans Affairs on track to end dog and cat testing, which it has since fully eliminated.
Until now, the NIH retained the dishonorable distinction of harboring the last deadly dog lab inside any federal agency. But the Trump NIH’s decisive action puts an end to four decades of taxpayer-funded beagle abuse.
White Coat Waste (WCW) first exposed this facility’s horrors in 2016. Since then, Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits uncovered grisly details of over 2,100 beagles abused and killed inside this NIH lab—many of them puppies just months old. These helpless dogs had their throats slit open, lungs filled with pneumonia-causing bacteria, and bodies bled out until septic shock took hold. If they survived four days, they were killed anyway. Their lifeless bodies were stored in refrigerators like garbage.
Taxpayers footed the bill, with beagles costing up to $4,000 apiece, and no meaningful results to show for it. This wasn’t just a moral outrage—it was a fiscal disgrace.
For years, we’ve worked together to hold NIH accountable and end these sickening experiments. We’ve proudly supported bipartisan amendments to specifically defund these experiments and other NIH’s in-house testing on dogs and cats.
Despite bipartisan support in Congress and backing from over 70 percent of taxpayers—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike—the Biden administration ignored our pleas to save these puppies and approved the project to continue through 2026.
But we finally have leadership at the NIH that’s listening, and the beagle-abusing bureaucrats were no match for Bhattacharya and Trump.
Trump’s Pentagon is also purging painful testing on pets. This past weekend, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced on X that it canceled a recenty-renewed grant for cruel $10 million experiments on cats that we’ve been working to cut. In the wasteful project that we enlisted bipartisan lawmakers, veterans, and others to oppose, a DOD-funded lab crippled and electroshocked cats for constipation, incontinence, and erectile dysfunction experiments. In its post announcing the cut, the DOD promised, “All waste at DOD is being removed.”
They’re already keeping their word. We’ve confirmed that the Trump Administration is ending a joint NIH-DOD contract paying for 300 beagles a week to be abused in a Chinese lab. According to federal documents uncovered by White Coat Waste, the Chinese lab justified the abuse of beagles because the dogs are “docile,” “cute” and “easy to domesticate.” Ghoulish and greedy mad scientists exploit the qualities that make beagles great pets in order to imprison and torture them in laboratories.
Our work isn’t done. While NIH and DOD have ended some pet abuse, taxpayers are still funding Fauci-era projects where dogs are infested with ticks and denied pain relief, are intentionally bred to suffer from bleeding disorders and blindness, and other ghoulish experiments. The NIH is even paying Moderna’s billionaire co-founder’s new company to test an experimental weight loss drug on beagles, and funding a project that sews kittens’ eyelids shut in a Canadian lab.
As Elon Musk put it on the Joe Rogan Experience when discussed Fauci’s beagle tests, “Mutilating animals in demented studies that are like the worst thing you can imagine from a horror show...Really some psychotic stuff that happens.”
Fortunately, our effort to cut dog and cat testing in the US and abroad has secured support from top Trump officials, Musk and even members of the First Family like Donald Trump, Jr, Eric Trump and Lara Trump.
The Trump administration is delivering historic victories for taxpayers and pets. These wins aren’t just symbolic—they’re saving millions of tax dollars, protecting pets from torture, and keeping President Trump’s promise to clean up government waste. We’re proud to have played a part in this.
Now, our message to every federal agency is simple: Not one more dog. Not one more dime.
Rep. Troy E. Nehls represents Texas’s 22nd District in Congress. Anthony Bellotti is the president and founder of government watchdog White Coat Waste.
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