The President Joe Biden administration has defunded all animal experimentation labs in Russia and is no longer sending millions of dollars to those labs while the country under President Vladimir Putin continues to attack Ukraine.
Most egregiously, in 2022 the NIH sent $770,000 to Russian government-owned Pavlov Institute of Physiology for experimentation on cats that involved damaging their brains and then forcing them to walk on treadmills.
It's difficult to fathom the need for such experimentation, but the NIH was funding it as well as hundreds of other experiments in foreign labs that are still going on today.
In June 2022, however, Biden quietly signed an executive order to end animal testing funding in Russia, part of its punishment for attacking Ukraine.
White Coat Waste Project, which has reported many of these NIH animal experimentation projects, noted that NIH says it is in compliance with Biden's order, which is good but a drop in the bucket compared to all the money being wasted torturing animals.
“NIH currently does not fund any research in Russia,” the NIH office of extramural research said in a statement to The Washington Times.
WCW Founder and President, Anthony Bellotti, said, “Over 75% of Republicans and Democrats agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay millions to Putin’s white coats to torture animals in wasteful experiments— and now, following our campaign, they won’t have to.”
As Hannah Cox, a fellow at WCW, pointed out in her piece for Based Politics, the U.S. federal government really has no business funding any foreign animal experimentation and it's hard to fathom why it would do so.
The government does a lot of ridiculous things now, and cutting frivolous government spending would be a great way to get closer to balancing the budget.
Unfortunately, Biden is much more interested in punishing Putin than getting the federal government back to what it was intended to be--very limited in its activities.
Defense and roads/infrastructure should really be all the government does on a national level, but Democrats have been far too successful in growing its size and scope over the years until it has become largely a nanny state and a source of pork projects to get members of Congress re-elected.
The Founding Fathers must be rolling over in their graves at the size of the federal government, among other things going on in the country today.
Most people who care about that kind of thing now despair that the government will ever get wasteful spending under control.
The WCW is continuing to request that funding for other wasteful activities also be defunded.
