Cosmetic companies often take heat for animal testing that they rarely — if ever — conduct anymore. Instead, it’s our nation’s universities that are the main culprits, wasting billions of our tax dollars and millions of animal lives for stupid, cruel, and useless experiments.
Uncle Sam doles out nearly $30 billion a year specifically for university research, approximately half of which is spent on animal testing subsidized by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture, NASA, and other agencies.
Harvard operates a taxpayer-funded mouse “fight club” (Harvard’s words, not mine) in which researchers breed aggressive mice, get them drunk, and force them to fight one another in scored matches not unlike dogfights. The price tag? $860,000 in taxpayer funds just last year.
At Princeton, experimenters confine monkeys in tiny cages, lock them in restraint devices, and record their screeching to create computer simulations of what it might sound like for a monkey to say “Will you marry me?” Your bill for this project was $339,395 in 2017 and over $3 million since 2007.
Last year’s Wastebook released by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., highlighted a $565,000 project at the University of California-San Diego in which amphibious fish were forced to walk on treadmills to the point of exhaustion. Hard to believe? Luckily, there’s a video.
Federally-funded boondoggles like these are the reason why experts estimate that 87.5 percent of biomedical research — particularly animal testing — is “wasteful.” This is especially true of government-funded research.
Last year, American Enterprise Institute scholar Dr. Thomas Stossel wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, that 85 percent of FDA-approved drugs and disease treatments are a result of privately-funded research, “not cash dumped into the National Institutes of Health.”
But, while the productive, ROI-minded private sector is resisting burdensome, wrong-headed government animal testing mandates, universities are fighting to keep taxpayer money flowing into their animal laboratories because they’ve become a veritable cash cow.
In addition to billions in research costs, a third of each federal grant goes towards university overhead — maintenance, utilities, administrative expenses — totaling $6.4 billion in tax money each year. And once university faculty gets on the gravy train, it’s easy to stay on and hard to get off of it.
A few years ago, University of Wisconsin-Madison staff obtained approval to use dozens of cats in deadly taxpayer-funded brain experiments by writing that, “this number [of cats] allows us to collect enough data to keep up a productive publication record that ensures our constant funding from NIH over these 30 years.”
As Red Alert Politics has reported, a majority of voters — and even more Republicans than Democrats — want to cut government spending on animal experiments and increase transparency about this taxpayer-funded animal abuse.
To this end, last year, the White Coat Waste Project partnered with Restore Accountability (now known as Pursuit) — a millennial-focused advocate for good governance and fiscal responsibility founded by former Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. — on a report that documented widespread violations of federal law requiring taxpayer-funded animal experimenters disclose the cost of their projects. The report immediately drew the attention of influential waste warriors Sens. Flake, Ron Johnson. R-Wisc., James Lankford, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., who secured an ongoing Government Accountability Office audit of the transparency problems we uncovered.
Another initiative by Sen. Paul would help ensure that impartial taxpayers have a say in whether these kinds of cruel and wasteful projects receive our money before the checks are written and cashed. Sen. Paul, a physician, recently introduced the BASIC Research Act to appoint a taxpayer advocate to review panels for federal research grants, in an effort to combat what he calls “silly science.”
College campuses, not cosmetics companies, are ground zero for our nation’s disturbing animal testing epidemic. The solution? Unite liberty-lovers and animal-lovers to attack the root of the problem: reckless government spending.
Anthony Bellotti is the founder and president of White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group working to end federally-funded animal experiments. Prior to starting WCW, Bellotti served as Executive Director of the American Association of Political Consultants and worked as a strategist on Republican candidate and issue campaigns.
