New bipartisan amendments led by Republican lawmakers for the 2026 Farm Bill target USDA funding for animal tests in the U.S. and in adversarial nations, first uncovered by watchdog White Coat Waste.
The House Rules Committee is reviewing amendments now, and the full Farm Bill is expected to be voted on by the House during the week of April 27.
Two proposals submitted by Rep. Paul Gosar and cosponsored by Reps. Nancy Mace, Scott Perry, and Dina Titus would cut USDA funding for painful testing on dogs and cats, and prohibit the USDA from funding any animal tests “being conducted in, or performed in collaboration with” China, Russia, or other “countries of concern.”
The amendments result from White Coat Waste investigations in recent years that uncovered USDA funding for these kinds of animal tests and drew criticism and action from lawmakers and Trump Administration officials.
In 2024, White Coat Waste exposed USDA and National Institutes of Health funding for experiments at Cornell University that infected kittens with COVID and then killed them.
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Senator Rand Paul featured the project in his Festivus waste report in 2024, citing White Coat’s work.
The USDA funding for Cornell’s COVID cat lab is set to run until May 31, 2026.
The group also uncovered USDA funding for deadly kitten testing at Auburn University.
The proposed Farm Bill amendment to defund foreign adversaries’ animal labs also follows a White Coat Waste investigation exposing how the Biden USDA funded a $1 million bird flu gain-of-function collaboration with Chinese researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its CCP-controlled parent organization.
The grant drew scrutiny from Senator Joni Ernst and Rep. Ben Cline, and, as Gateway Pundit previously reported, last year, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins cut funding for this dangerous animal research project and ended it early.
In 2023, White Coat Waste found a disturbing USDA grant funding an experimental fur farm controlled by the Russian government that breeds foxes to be “tame” or “aggressive,” videotapes them, and then kills and dissects their brains.
Another amendment submitted by Reps. Mace and Titus would add legislation, called Violet’s Law, to the Farm Bill, requiring all federal research facilities to have policies allowing lab animals to be retired and rehomed.
In 2019, during the first Trump Administration, the USDA shut down the now-infamous “kitten cannibalism” lab exposed by White Coat Waste that bought cat and dog meat from wet markets in China and force-fed it to kittens at a USDA lab in Maryland. The lab also adopted out the 28 cats left there.
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