Senators are applauding themselves this week for advancing a bill providing more medical research funds, but one animal rights group is not so pleased with their bipartisan accomplishment.
The National Institutes of Health doesn’t deserve another $2 billion annually, because it already wastes the money it’s provided, says the animal-rights group White Coat Waste Project.
“With a national debt of $19 trillion, the last thing Congress needs to be doing is increasing spending on an agency notorious for its waste of $12 billion a year in taxpayer money on things like ‘discovering’ that male rats like ejaculating or that monkeys who smoke crack behave like crack-smoking monkeys,” the group said in a statement Wednesday.
The group went on to chide NIH researchers, which it called “well-heeled academics,” for “making bank” by “forcing shrimp, dogs and monkey to run on treadmills.”
Such research, the White Coat Waste Project, is no more than “variations on a theme of the same experiments, over and over again, for decades, with no cures for serious human illnesses.”
“NIH doesn’t have a funding problem; it has a spending problem,” the group said.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is poised to pass a spending bill Thursday that provides a new infusion of $2 billion to NIH, bringing the agency’s annual budget up to $34 billion. NIH is one of the nation’s foremost funders of medical research.
