This story is part of a collaboration with The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina.
A federal health agency that has promised to scale back its animal research has drawn the attention of animal rights advocates who want to know why it quietly approved millions in new funding for dozens of primate experiments since President Trump took office.
“The NIH’s rhetoric about reducing animal testing doesn’t match reality,” said Justin Goodman, senior vice president of White Coat Waste, an organization that has described the Trump Administration’s commitment to drastically reduce animal testing as a “watershed moment” in its fight to end the practice.
His group is highlighting the new spending to add pressure on National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, one of several federal officials who promised that the agency will stop funding all but the most essential animal research and implement alternative testing methods. That decision — highly controversial in the world of medical research — comes at a moment when animal rights advocates have unprecedented leverage within the U.S. government through their close alliances with the president and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NIH did not respond to requests for comment. In April, Bhattacharya said the initiative to steer projects to alternative tests “marks a critical leap forward for science, public trust, and patient care.”
One of the new projects is a kidney transplant study that will use about 99 monkeys at a cost of about $10,000 each, bought from a South Carolina primate farm. That operation gained global attention last year when federally-owned research monkeys escaped into a rural town.
Monkeys from Alpha Genesis will be used in new kidney research at the University of Pittsburgh that involves doing transplants in monkeys and euthanizing them at the study’s conclusion. The project got $1.4 million in July from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The study is slated to receive $10.1 million through 2030, according to funding documents.
The university said in a statement its researchers are “grateful for the federal support and closely follow all regulations and industry standards, including continual evaluation of the suppliers of animal models that, at this time, remain necessary to our ability to achieve medical breakthroughs that save human lives.
White Coat Waste has catalogued about $91 million in spending on animal research in recent months and provided details of the kidney project funding.The group has used Freedom of Information Act requests and spending documents to compile a list of more than 70 projects receiving money through the National Institutes of Health, despite promises to cut back on the funding.
Animal rights groups have estimated that the federal government spends as much as $20 billion a year on research involving dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals. NIH is the biggest funder.
Some controversial animal projects were cut from the budget as the Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk focused on wasteful spending. A joint investigation by CBS News and The Post and Courier found nearly $28 million in cancelled federal grants.
Animal rights groups and some scientists have questioned the scientific value of animal experiments, which are often inconclusive. But patients rely on drugs and medical procedures under development for new treatments.
Primates have been used for decades to test new medications and treatments before they move to clinical trials in humans.
Alpha Genesis has regularly supplied monkeys for studies that hope to one day improve human tolerance for transplanted organs. But it came under criticism last year after the dramatic monkey escape and a regulatory lapse that led to the deaths of 22 research monkeys from apparent carbon monoxide poisoning. Whistleblowers inside the monkey farm reported the fatalities to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group, which alerted a federal animal protection agency. Greg Westergaard, the company president, did not respond to a message.
White Coat Waste also discovered in March that NIAID would continue funding for the operations of Morgan Island, a remote barrier island popularly known as “Monkey Island” where the federal agency keeps up to 4,000 rhesus monkeys destined for research.