POLITICS: How Donald Trump can cut $20 billion in spending, wipe out Anthony Fauci’s leftover bloat — and save animals

President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has elevated the problem of wasteful spending from think-tank white papers to a national cover story. With $36 trillion in national debt — more than $300,000 per taxpayer — there’s a lot of spending to slash.

What better way to start than by cutting the $20 billion the government wastes every year on dead-end experiments that torture dogs, cats and other animals?

Trump 1.0 scored unprecedented wins against expensive and ineffective animal tests. Here are four easy ways the returning administration and Congress can continue to save millions of animals and stop billions in reckless spending.

1. Defund painful testing on dogs and cats.

COVID czar Anthony Fauci may be gone from government, but we’ve uncovered how cruel taxpayer-funded testing on dogs and cats he and other bureaucrats greenlit continues at labs in the United States, China, Canada and elsewhere.

DOGE recently highlighted a number of these wasteful programs we’ve exposed including the $5 million the National Institutes of Health is squandering to inject beagles with cocaine, the $770,000 the NIH shipped to a Russian lab to sever cats’ spinal cords and force them to run on treadmills and more than $1 million spent to spin kittens around for motion-sickness experiments.

Eighty-five percent of taxpayers oppose government funding for painful experiments on pets, a national October poll found.

But we detailed at a congressional briefing last month that more than 60,000 dogs and cats are still locked in American labs. End it now.

2. Cut off China’s animal labs.

The NIH is still funding 26 animal-testing laboratories in China, several of which are linked to the Chinese military and government. The agency recently paid one lab in China more than $2 million to force-feed and inject puppies and other animals with experimental drugs in completely unnecessary tests.

And though the US Intelligence Community is concerned about China’s development and use of bioweapons, the Biden-Harris Department of Agriculture is collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Chinese Communist Party-run parent organization on a $1 million taxpayer-funded bird-flu gain-of-function project slated to run until 2026.

After the Wuhan lab’s work led to COVID and the Chinese government refused to cooperate with investigations into the US-funded animal tests there, no animal lab in China should receive another red cent of taxpayers’ money.

3. Restore Trump’s EPA animal-testing phaseout plan.

President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency made history when it rolled out a strategy to shutter its misleading, expensive and cruel animal tests by 2035 and retire lab animals. This was the first time a federal agency set a hard and fast timeline to end animal testing, which is unproductive and bested by new technology. Republicans and Democrats celebrated the move. 

But the Biden administration quickly and quietly canceled the phaseout without any attempt to implement it, and the agency is back to forcing pesticides down puppies’ throats and abusing other animals in useless experiments. It literally refused to retire aging rabbits and let them die instead.

Restoring Trump’s common-sense animal-testing phaseout plan will protect puppies, public health and the public pocketbook.

4. Flush Fauci’s animal labs.

Want to save billions and a ton of animals in one fell swoop? Crack down on Fauci’s broken and corrupt National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the agency that brought us COVID and other real-life horror shows.

Fauci and his team violated a federal gain-of function ban, lied to Congress about it and broke the law by using private email to evade the Freedom of Information Act to discuss the lab leak and Beaglegate scandals. The rot runs deep. 

But wait — there’s more. The agency is importing bats from Asia for dangerous virus experiments, infecting primates with Ebola in its high-risk biolabs, engineering transgender lab animals and shipping more of our tax dollars — $2 billion from 2011 to 2021 — to unaccountable foreign animal labs than any other agency.

We’ve been working together for years to cut the government’s wasteful and inhumane experiments on pets and other animals. We’re thrilled other like-minded Republicans will be joining us in Washington to get the job done.

For the millions of Americans who care about slashing government spending and saving animals, this is our moment. Stop the money. Stop the madness.

Nicole Malliotakis represents New York’s 11th Congressional District and co-chairs the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus. Anthony Bellotti is president and founder of government-watchdog group White Coat Waste Project.