The Trump Administration’s Achievements for Science and Animals
January 22: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reaffirmed its commitment to eliminating animal tests. This renewed focus on non-animal methods reflects the agency’s long-standing position and the significant scientific and technological progress that now allows for more reliable, human-relevant testing approaches. These advances better protect humans, wildlife, and the environment without relying on outdated animal tests.
December 2: The FDA called on the pharmaceutical industry to replace the use of primates, dogs, pigs, and other animals who are routinely killed in painful tests to meet FDA requirements. As the agency noted earlier in the year, a specific category of drugs—monoclonal antibodies—is a starting point for this new approach. Now, the FDA has invited the entire industry to actively bring their animal replacement approaches forward.
PETA scientists are developers of a candidate therapeutic monoclonal antibody, have suggested these and other animal replacement opportunities to the FDA, and stand ready to support the agency and any pharmaceutical manufacturer in need of assistance in rising to the agency’s challenge.
As testing a single antibody drug can use and kill more than 100 monkeys, this federal reform will translate directly into fewer captures, fewer shipments, and fewer endangered macaques sacrificed for data modern science can deliver without them.
November 21: The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) instructed its staff to end all experiments on monkeys, a decision affecting approximately 200 macaques currently in its laboratories. This decision will stop the endless killing and spare thousands upon thousands of monkeys who otherwise would continue to be killed there until the end of time.
For years, endangered and often infected macaques have been funneled into U.S. labs. CDC’s own data show monkeys arriving with tuberculosis, melioidosis, and other pathogens; weak testing protocols; and a supply chain riddled with escapes, disease lapses, and regulatory failures. PETA has exposed these dangers at every turn, and this announcement proves that the system is finally confronting the truth.
PETA is calling on the administration to build on this breakthrough: shut down the primate centers, end the monkey-import pipeline, and move every federal agency toward modern, human-relevant science.
September 25: NIH announced it will be opening the Standardized Organoid Modeling Center, a national resource for human organoid models. PETA has frequently advocated for the agency to create such hubs for human-based, in vitro technologies, as in this 2023 public comment to NIH, as a way to accelerate the continued improvement and validation of complex cellular models and provide technical support to scientists throughout the U.S.
On the same day, the agency announced that grant funds can now be used for animal retirement or rehoming. Previously, these funds could only be used for the acquisition, “care,” and use of animals in experimentation. The new policy also applies to animal resource facilities. No animal should be used in experimentation—EVER—but this common-sense policy change finally recognizes that death is not the only option for animals who have seen the worst of what humanity can bring.
July 9: Related to the July 7th announcement, NIH announced that a funding opportunity for young experimenters to do experiments on monkeys would be expiring early. This funding opportunity had previously bankrolled experiments where pregnant monkeys were injected with viruses or chemicals and then their babies were euthanized and dissected. On the same day, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of NIH’s institutes, announced it would no longer be participating in a different funding opportunity for young experimenters to do HIV experiments on monkeys. This funding opportunity had previously been used to fund experiments where monkeys were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus and subjected to different therapies.
July 7: NIH-FDA hosted a historic joint Workshop on Reducing Animal Testing to share updates on both agencies transition away from animal experiments and tests.
During the workshop, NIH announced that it will stop asking researchers to do animal-only experiments and that all new funding solicited by the agency will include the option to use non-animal methods. This means, for example, that we won’t see valuable public resources limited to futile attempts to make monkeys serve as a stand-in for humans in HIV research or genetically manipulate mice to be born with a condition that poorly approximates Down Syndrome.
The FDA shared its intentions to incentivize companies to use non-animal tests, accept non-animal tests that have already been extensively vetted in Europe and beyond, and publicize examples of where non-animal tests have been used by companies and accepted by the agency. Listed among the FDA’s high-priority items were those that PETA has been advocating to end for years, including vaccine testing, pyrogenicity testing, and skin irritation testing on animals.
June 23: The U.S. Coast Guard reaffirmed to PETA that it has ended the use of animals in “live tissue training.” The assurance from Acting Commandant Vice Admiral Peter W. Gauthier, states that the Coast Guard “does NOT, nor does it intend, to conduct live tissue training.” This decision comes after PETA raised concern about a 2025 policy document that appeared to permit such deadly exercises.
May 27: Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced a full ban on U.S. Navy-funded experiments on dogs and cats, ending decades of cruel testing on these species by this military branch.
May 23: NIH terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut. PETA first exposed Harvard’s infant monkey experiments in the fall of 2022, revealing that Margaret Livingstone took baby monkeys away from their mothers and deprived them of normal visual input to observe the harmful effects on their developing brains. Among other experiments, Livingstone forced infant monkeys to wear goggles that simulated disorienting strobe lights for the first 18 months of their lives.
May 4: NIH closed its in-house beagle lab, where thousands of dogs were used in pneumonia and septic-shock experiments. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya confirmed that this move aligned with the administration’s policy to pivot toward superior non-animal methods. One of the studies involved dogs in a sepsis study, an area of animal use that PETA and our supporters have long sought to end.
April 29: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a plan to move funding away from animal experimentation and toward cutting-edge non-animal research methods. The agency’s plan includes the following:
- NIH will establish the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application (ORIVA) within the Office of the Director to coordinate efforts agency-wide.
- ORIVA will expand funding, training, and infrastructure for non-animal approaches.
- NIH will update grant review criteria to include human relevance and translatability, train reviewers to reduce any bias toward animal experiments, and include experts in non-animal methods on grant review committees.
- NIH will publicly report on its progress toward the goal of reducing animal experimentation and better supporting non-animal research.
This change in priorities reflects persistent advocacy and expert guidance from PETA and other experts. NIH’s new plan adopts several recommendations from PETA scientists’ strategy to phase out animal use, Research Modernization NOW, including expanding funding, training, and infrastructure for non-animal methods. As mentioned above, the agency will also work toward mitigating animal methods bias in NIH grant review panels — a problem that we recently documented in a first-of-its-kind study — and to include more non-animal methods experts on these committees.
These efforts are spearheaded by Drs. Nicole Kleinstreuer and Warren Casey, two renowned and accomplished leaders who have been working to reduce animal use for decades. PETA scientists have worked with Drs. Kleinstreuer and Casey and their staff for more than a decade, including coauthoring more than 20 peer-reviewed publications that have advanced the use of non-animal toxicology methods that replace animal tests.
April 10: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced plans to phase out animal testing requirements for drugs, including the development of monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are used in research and to treat a variety of diseases. This policy change could spare tens of thousands of animals each year. PETA scientists have done groundbreaking work in this area, including funding the development of non-animal antibodies to fight infection.
March 4: President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) canceled 10 NIH grants funding invasive “transgender animal” experiments, which had involved subjecting thousands of animals to hormone injections, surgeries, and chemical overdoses, and costing taxpayers more than $10 million. PETA first exposed pointless transgender studies on monkeys in 2022, and made the point that research in this area must not involve animals.
