Congress Should Advance Plan to Cut Spending on Federally Funded Animal Experiments

I was invited to testify before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation about why federal agencies should end wasteful and cruel animal experiments and how modern human-based methods could help save both money and the lives of humans and animals.

Consider this: Since 1991, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has sent $15 million to Wayne State University for heart experiments that have killed hundreds of dogs and failed to benefit a single patient.

Congress must cut funding for this and so much more wasteful research, including the seven National Primate Research Centers, which continue to kill monkeys as long as our tax dollars support them, and useless animal experiments aimed at investigating human nutrition when the principles have already been or could be studied in human-based approaches.

Our government also foots the bill for millions annually on animal experiments outside of the United States with no oversight. The recently introduced CARGO Act, sponsored by Reps. Troy Nehls (R-TX) and Dina Titus (D-NV), should be passed to block this funding.

If these experiments come as a surprise, that’s because the U.S. government’s lack of transparency has left Americans largely in the dark about federally funded animal research. Subcommittee members seemed shocked to learn how dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, pigs, and other animals continue to be used in government-funded experiments that are commonly painful, stressful, and lethal.

The government also fails to accurately gather or report the number of animals used by labs. But estimates suggest more than 100 million animals are used in U.S. labs each year—most of them in facilities funded by the federal government.

Federal law does not even recognize many animals—most mice, rats, birds bred for research, and all invertebrates—excluding them from reporting requirements, something I hope Congress will address by amending the Animal Welfare Act. This law should also be amended to block experiments on animals when research objectives can be met without using animals.

The proposed Federal Animal Research Accountability Act should be enacted to require that all recipients of NIH funding annually, accurately, and transparently report the number of animals housed, bred, and used in research, organized by species. This is not a wild idea—it’s already done in other countries.

Equally murky are details about the amount of money the federal government spends on animal experiments. From Freedom of Information Act requests and agency reporting, some information can be gleaned. In 2015, 47% of NIH’s extramural experiments used mice—about $7.4 billion in 2024 dollars. Our analysis revealed that in 2023, 45% of National Cancer Institute grants were likely animal-related. Compare that to the meager 8% of NIH-funded nonclinical research that used nonanimal approaches in 2021.

With billions of federal dollars spent annually and many animals killed, we still have no treatments or cures for common diseases like Alzheimer’s. If animals were good models for humans, we’d have a much better understanding of human health and disease, and the products developed would be safe and actually work for patients who need them.

That isn’t the case. If anything, animal studies have gravely misled us. Nine out of 10 new drugs that appear successful in animals later fail in humans, largely because they are unsafe or simply don’t work. Paying for those failures is partially why a single drug can take over a decade and cost over a billion to develop.

Rather than continuing to use animals of questionable human relevance, human-based approaches offer scientists the opportunity to use human information to study human health and disease and to develop products.

Advanced models, like organoids, organ chips, and reconstructed human tissues, allow scientists to use human cells combined with lab-based technologies to understand human outcomes. Using these methods, scientists no longer have to cross their fingers and hope the results translate to humans.

Sophisticated computer models allow scientists to simulate complex biological systems to predict human outcomes. These approaches can be combined, and when put to the test, have already been shown to do better than animals.

Multiple federal efforts have already begun accelerating these innovative human-based methods. The NIH recently adopted advisory committee recommendations on nonanimal approaches that recognize the value of human-based science and call for increased training and infrastructure support. On relatively small budget, the NIH’s NICEATM leads impressive work across agencies to evaluate, advance, and confirm that nonanimal test methods are relevant to humans and are reproducible. NCATS supports innovative nonanimal methods to speed drug development, leading to two approvals for treatments for rare diseases. The newly launched Complement-ARIE Program will speed development and use of nonanimal methods.

While each of these are steps in the right direction, federal investment in these methods pales in comparison to vast funding going towards animal experiments. With savings gained from reducing wasteful animal experiments, our government should reinvest in these sensible programs that will rapidly advance better science leading to improved outcomes for people while avoiding animal use. Congress can help achieve this goal.

Elizabeth Baker, Esq., is director of research policy for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.