10 Wins for Taxpayer

Thank you — and our grassroots army — for your generous support to stop NIH’s dog lab at the University of Missouri and other abusive tests. We covered our rapid response budget.

Now, we’ll start 2026 strong and ramp up the fight to get the U.S. government out of the animal testing business. 

Thirty years ago: I decided to end animal testing after working in a laboratory. It became my life’s work. 

Fifteen years ago: I founded White Coat Waste — the nation’s leading organization shutting down taxpayer-funded animal labs. 

Today: WCW has ended Pentagon pet abuse! Your support just cut off all painful tests on dogs and cats at the Department of Defense. 

Here’s more on your impact. Thanks for making it happen. 

Stop the Money. Stop the Madness! 

Anthony Bellotti President & Founder White Coat Waste

P.S. Taxpayer, Washington City Paper has ten more reasons why you and WCW are the nation’s most effective team at getting animals out of labs. See below. 

10 Wins White Coat Waste Delivered for Taxpayers and Animals in 2025
Originally published by Washington City Paper

Major media outlets including the New York Times, CBS News and the New Yorker are reporting how White Coat Waste’s game-changing bipartisan work has made ending cruel and wasteful taxpayer-funded animal testing a priority for Congress and the Trump administration.

So in the spirit of the season, here are ten wins for taxpayers and animals that WCW delivered in 2025:

1. Congress defunded the Pentagon’s painful pet experiments

Just last week, President Donald Trump signed the 2026 defense policy bill, which included a bipartisan WCW-backed measure slashing funding for the Pentagon’s painful experiments on dogs and cats. This marks the first time in history that Congress cut funding for the Department of Defense’s experiments on pets. WCW exposed how the DoD wasted over $57 million on testing like poisoning puppies with experimental drugs and implanting electrodes in cats’ heads in laboratories in the U.S. and around the world.

2. U.S. Navy became the first agency to ban dog and cat testing

Prior to Congress cutting funding for DoD’s pet abuse, the U.S. Navy issued the federal government’s first-ever ban on experiments on dogs and cats, crediting WCW’s investigations and advocacy for the move. Before prohibiting all testing on pets, the Navy canceled a $10 million contract for cruel constipation experiments on cats that was uncovered by a WCW lawsuit.

3. NIH shuttered its last in-house beagle lab

Following nearly a decade of relentless WCW campaigning, the National Institutes of Health officially shut down the last beagle experimentation lab inside the agency’s Bethesda, Md. headquarters. Our lawsuits and investigations exposed how over 40 years, the lab abused more than 2,100 beagles in deadly septic shock experiments and planned to continue through August 2026 before we stopped them. This was the federal government’s largest and last confirmed in-house dog lab.

4. Feds cut contract for drug testing on 300 “cute” beagles per week in China

A WCW investigation exposed and ended a joint NIH-DOD contract funding drug testing on 300 beagles a week at a lab in China. The taxpayer-funded experiments involved force feeding and injecting beagles with massive doses of experimental drugs. The cruel contract justified the animal tests by stating: “Beagle dog is docile, cute, and easy to domesticate, so it has been the best choice.”

5. The VA eliminated all primate labs

In another historic first, the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed it was ahead of schedule on becoming the first federal agency to fully eliminate primate testing following years of WCW investigations and advocacy. Documents obtained via WCW lawsuits exposed how the VA injected primates with Angel Dust, damaged their brains, and crushed their spinal cords to cripple them.

6. The CDC is shutting down its primate labs

Following years of WCW efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is shutting down its in-house primate labs and looking to send the animals to sanctuaries. Since 2018, WCW has been pushing the CDC to end its primate tests and retire the survivors from its Atlanta lab, where about 200 monkeys are confined and infected with smallpox, Ebola, hepatitis, and HIV-like viruses at taxpayer expense.

7. The EPA ended animal tests and retired lab survivors

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it is shutting down its in-house animal testing labs and adopting out rabbits, rats and fish rather than keep subjecting them to cruel and wasteful toxic exposure tests. After years of taxpayer-funded suffering exposed by WCW, those animals are finally getting a second chance.

8. The USDA canceled a cruel and dangerous bird flu experiment

The USDA pulled the plug on a $1 million collaboration with labs in the U.K. and China that recklessly used gain-of-function methods to soup up bird flu viruses in the lab and see if they could jump to mammals. Government records secured by WCW showed that animals as young as one-day-old would be infected with bird flu and allowed to suffer and die in painful and “severe” experiments without any pain relief.

9. DOGE axed deadly NIH-funded tests on bunnies in China

The Department of Government Efficiency cut a cruel NIH animal testing grant to China Medical University that WCW uncovered had received $135,000 last year and $677,000 since 2020. The lab spent the funding to infect rabbits with malaria and cover mice in mosquitoes so they could suck their blood with virtually no oversight or accountability.

10. Feds blacklist EcoHealth Alliance, the notorious virus-hunting nonprofit

Following years of WCW lobbying—and relying, in part, on documents first obtained by a WCW investigation — the federal government debarred EcoHealth Alliance from federal funding for five years.  WCW first exposed how EcoHealth funneled taxpayer dollars to dangerous gain-of-function animal experiments in Wuhan that agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation believe caused COVID. In all, the nonprofit raked in over $146 million in taxpayer funding for risky virus-hunting and animal experiments in labs around the world.

Too often, taxpayers end up with a lump of coal from Uncle Sam.

But this year, thanks to White Coat Waste, Washington delivered some stuff worth unwrapping.