UW Ran Corrupt Animal Experiment Oversight Committee While Receiving Millions in Federal Funds, PETA Reveals
For Immediate Release:
November 20, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
After years of ultimately successful court battles to obtain the names of all individuals appointed to the federally required animal experiment oversight committee at the University of Washington (UW), PETA has found that the panel was stacked with industry insiders—showing brazen contempt for federal law and Public Health Service requirements. PETA today filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requesting an investigation and swift action against UW, which has received more funding from the National Institutes of Health than any other public university, for repeatedly operating in apparent violation of the law.
PETA found that for at least 29 months between 2020 and 2025, the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) reviewed and decided on roughly 1,500 experiments involving thousands of animals without valid authority.
PETA is asking HHS to recover all federal funds awarded during these months for experiments on animals, terminate all affected grants, retract published papers associated with those grants, suspend or debar the responsible institutional officials, and impose civil penalties on the university and all committee members who participated in or benefited from UW’s deception.
Federal law, regulation, and guidance mandate that a non-scientist and an individual entirely unaffiliated with the university be seated on the committee, in part because ethical oversight cannot function if everyone at the table has a stake in keeping experiments running. These roles are supposed to provide independent oversight free from conflicts of interest, ensuring that research institutions and animal experimenters aren’t simply policing themselves.
But records PETA obtained after prolonged legal opposition by UW and former and current committee members reveal that the seats reserved for independent voices were instead filled by longtime defenders of animal experimentation and individuals with direct ties to the university.
“UW rigged its animal oversight committee with insiders whose allegiances were never to ethics or accountability, but to the very system they were supposed to check—and for more than two years, that committee approved experiments harming thousands of animals while UW collected staggering amounts of federal funding,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “It’s an outright betrayal of the animals and of public trust, and taxpayers should demand that the federal government cut funding.”
Among those appointed were two leaders from an industry lobbying group created to defend and expand animal experimentation. The unaffiliated positions—meant to represent the public, not the university—went to:
• a one-time UW employee
• a donor married to a former UW staffer
• a former animal experimenter.
The university and committee members desperately tried—and failed—to keep the names of committee members secret, using the courts and attempting a publicity campaign that falsely claimed that revealing committee members’ names would jeopardize their safety.
Tens of thousands of animals are confined in UW laboratories, including monkeys at the Washington National Primate Research Center, dogs, pigs, ferrets, rabbits, mice, rats, and zebrafish. Experimenters drill into their skulls, infect them with deadly diseases, slowly drive them insane in barren cages, and kill them when their bodies give out. Animals at UW have suffered agonizing deaths in botched surgeries, untreated infections, preventable disease outbreaks, irradiation, starvation, dehydration, strangulation, scalding, blood loss, and more.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
