He doesn’t get enough credit for it, but in his first term, President Donald Trump shut down some of the worst taxpayer-funded animal abuses imaginable, from deadly dog and cat experiments to dangerous bat labs in Wuhan.
My old friends at the non-profit White Coat Waste Project have just released a four-point-plan for Trump 2.0 that can save billions and make America great again for animals: Defund dog and cat testing, cut off animal labs in China, reinstate Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency animal testing phaseout, and abolish Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Cutting all taxpayer funding for barbaric dog and cat experimentation is a no-brainer.
Last time around, I worked with President Trump and his daughter-in-law Lara, Matt Gaetz and others to stop the Department of Veterans Affairs from conducting inhumane experiments on dogs, like injecting puppies' arteries with latex to induce heart attacks. In addition to ending painful dog tests, Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture shut down the government’s largest cat lab where, no kidding, kittens were being force-fed cat and dog meat from disgusting Chinese wet markets.
Unfortunately, WCW has documented how the National Institutes of Health, the USDA and the Pentagon are still wasting tens of millions of dollars to torture pets in unnecessary experiments like injecting puppies with cocaine and shoving marbles in cats’ butts.
Next, we need to defund animal testing labs in China. As we’ve learned the hard way from the Wuhan lab leak, the U.S. government’s animal abuse is an international problem.
President Trump famously cut off Fauci’s funding to the Wuhan lab following a White Coat Waste investigation. But, Donald Trump, Jr and others recently helped WCW expose how the Biden-Harris NIH is still shipping tax money to dozens of other animal labs in China for disgusting dog testing and other animal experiments. Some of the animal labs being funded with our money by the NIH are even controlled by or tied to the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army. We must stop this madness.
Third, we need incoming EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to reinstate the Trump plan to phase out animal testing.
In 2019, Trump EPA chief Andrew Wheeler announced a landmark, widely celebrated plan to end tests on dogs, rabbits & all mammals by 2035, with a 30 percent drawdown by 2025. Instead, within months of taking office, the Biden-Harris EPA killed the plan and started wasting money on woke animal testing for climate change and gun control at the urging of radical environmentalists who claimed we needed more animal testing to promote social justice.
Zeldin was a leader on efforts with WCW to end animal testing when he was in Congress during the first Trump Administration, so this should be an easy lift for him.
Finally, Trump should abolish Dr. NIAID. We all know how Fauci’s NIAID funded the Wuhan lab’s experiments on humanized mice that caused COVID and those horrendous biting fly experiments on beagles that began WCW’s viral #BeagleGate campaign.
But, despite prompting a pandemic, NIAID still enjoys a $6.5 billion annual budget, which is over 13% of NIH’s total budget and the second largest of any NIH division.
These days, NIAID wastes this money to implant tissues and organs from aborted human fetuses into lab animals (something Trump halted, and Biden restarted), create transgender mice and monkeys, engineer deadly viruses that can use used as bioweapons, give kittens COVID and infest beagles with bugs. NIAID is also squandering tens of millions to confine 3,000 primates on Monkey Island and build a new U.S. bat virus lab devised by Wuhan lab partner EcoHealth Alliance.
To rid this nation of Fauci’s legacy, NIAID needs to be eliminated and reinvented before it causes another pandemic and butchers more beagles.
I’m encouraged to see that many of these items have already ended up on the Department of Government Efficiency’s desk as examples of wasteful spending to be eliminated. DOGE Senate Caucus Chair Joni Ernst, House DOGE Subcommittee Chair Marjorie Taylor Greene and Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul have all been involved in efforts with WCW to expose and cut this animal-abusing waste as well.
In his triumphant return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, President Trump is perfectly positioned to pick up where he left off and make even more animal welfare history by cutting reckless spending that hurts animals and taxpayers.
Roger Stone is a New York Times best-selling author and editor and publisher of StoneZone.com.