by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 6, 2023) — An article we published a week ago about animal experiments conducted by the U.S. government both domestically and overseas is reposted in full in an August 5 newsletter issued by the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP), a 501(c)3 organization founded several years ago.
WCWP focuses on reining in wasteful government spending, particularly in the area of experimentation on animals which is painful, often leads to death, and has cost taxpayers millions of dollars over at least six decades.
As WCWP reported, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Sec. Denis McDonough is seeking funding from Congress to conduct an experiment on cats purportedly to test the durability of a device which he said could assist veterans who have undergone an amputation or suffered a stroke. The request, made last year to the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies, flagged WCWP’s attention since a phasing-out of animal experimentation by the U.S. by 2025 is reportedly in process, largely due to the group’s advocacy.
“In recent years, we’ve shuttered the government’s largest cat lab, the USDA’s Kitten Slaughterhouse, and saved the survivors,” WCWP reported on July 11. “The only other federal agency that was using our tax dollars to torture cats in painful experiments was the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). We’ve stopped them too.”
“But one Biden Administration bureaucrat wants to restart this kitten cat-astrophe,” the group cautioned in the same post, providing a diagram it obtained through a FOIA request showing the proposed cat experiment requiring “leads exiting the skin between the shoulder blades, with the leads going to an implanted high-density connector (in red); the distal half of the connector would have some leads looped back to the package, and some dummy terminated leads.”
From McDonough’s letter to Subcommittee Chairman Martin Heinrich (D-NM) at the time, it appears the “research” has already begun. According to WCWP, August and September constitute the time of the year the VA would likely purchase the subject seven cats for the experiment.
WCWP’s strategy, it states, is threefold:
(1) Find. (2) Expose. (3) Defund...
- Find: First, we find government waste. Through hard-hitting investigations that include tracking federal payouts and filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we uncover wasteful spending on cruel animal tests.
- Expose: Then, we expose government waste. We alert Congress, the media, and the public with aggressive advertising campaigns.
- Defund: Finally, we defund government waste. We work with members of Congress on both side of the aisle to cut the spending and retire the survivors!