Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To read more from this series, click here.
The Trump administration has bold plans to fix the broken National Institutes of Health and erase Dr. Anthony Fauci’s fingerprints. Entrenched agency bureaucrats are standing in the way.
In recent interviews defending his proposed cuts to the NIH’s bloated budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought singled out wasteful animal tests exposed by White Coat Waste investigations as poster children for the troubled public health agency.
Vought told Face the Nation, “$2 million for injecting dogs with cocaine … that’s the kind of waste we’ve seen at the NIH. And that’s not even getting to the extent to which the NIH was weaponized against the American people … with regard to funding gain-of-function research that caused the pandemic.”
As Vought said, “NIH is a program that if they were a company … their stock prices would be in shambles.”
He’s absolutely right.
As I testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year, the NIH wastes nearly 40% of its $48 billion budget each year on grants funding stupid, dangerous, and cruel animal experiments in the United States and abroad that most taxpayers oppose and deliver little return for patients and the public.
Other NIH-funded boondoggles WCW has uncovered include creating transgender lab monkeys, staging hamster fight clubs, sewing healthy kittens’ eyes shut and chopping off their legs in foreign labs, paying pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and overseas to poison puppies with experimental drugs, and making monkeys gamble in exchange for a sip of cherry Coke.
FOIA FOLLIES: HOW THE DEEP STATE AVOIDS TRANSPARENCY
The billions in wasteful NIH animal testing like this are low-hanging fruit waiting to be cut.
But NIH holdovers have been defying Vought and the Trump administration to maintain business as usual.
Just look at the two examples Vought called out. Current NIH leadership is apparently undermining President Donald Trump’s promise to ban gain-of-function and has recently extended the contract for horrendous cocaine tests on beagles. They’re also racing to spend every last penny of the agency’s $47 billion budget by the end of the month, including tens of millions to renew Fauci’s animal labs and fund brand new beagle tests.
The rot runs deep at NIH.
A new WCW review of the agency’s current leadership found that, under Trump-appointed Director Jay Bhattacharya, every single person on the NIH leadership roster and every institute director is a Fauci acolyte or some other NIH holdover who has been steering the agency wrong for years, in some cases decades.
For instance, the Fauci-loving, Trump-hating NIH Deputy Director installed as the agency’s de facto “animal testing czar” told National Public Radio, “We have no intention of just phasing out animal studies overnight. We know that animal studies are still very important and often scientifically justified.” In response to criticism from WCW, she later stated, “We cannot phase out animal tests overnight … Without better science, animal tests unfortunately continue.”
Wrong.
Animal testing is junk science to begin with. Contrary to what NIH bureaucrats, establishment animal rights groups, and the pro-animal testing lobby would have you believe, the NIH doesn’t need to spend more money on organs, a chip, or artificial intelligence before we can end this waste and abuse — quite the opposite. We simply need to stop forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for it.
Our group’s biggest victories under both Trump administrations prove that point:
The Food and Drug Administration’s nicotine tests on primates? Shut down and monkeys moved to a sanctuary.
The government’s largest kitten lab? Closed and cats rescued.
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ dog, cat, and primate experiments? Eliminated.
NIH’s bizarre transgender animal experiments? Slashed.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s in-house animal labs? Shuttered and animals adopted out.
NIH’s septic shock beagle lab? Closed.
Fauci’s kitten tests? Canceled and cats saved.
The Pentagon’s dog and cat labs? Cut and banned.
And who can forget Fauci’s gain-of-function experiments on bats and humanized mice in Wuhan that Trump cut days after WCW first exposed it in April 2020? Relegated to the trash heap, not replaced.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE ‘REFORMING THE DEEP STATE’ SERIES
The solution to the NIH’s multibillion-dollar animal testing problem is less spending, not more. But its leadership is dominated by spendthrift bureaucrats who don’t want to get off the gravy train.
Vought is correct: “We have an agency that needs dramatic overhaul.” To cut waste at the NIH, Trump needs to clean house.
Justin Goodman is the senior vice president at nonprofit government watchdog White Coat Waste.
