MAHA Is Monkeying Around With Lab Rats

The Trump administration seems determined to reduce scientific testing on animals. Just how serious is it about its new pet project?

In 1903, Mark Twain published A Dog’s Tale, a short story told from the perspective of a dog named Aileen. Half-collie, half–Saint Bernard, Aileen lives with Mr. Gray, a scientist; his wife; and their two children. One winter, a fire starts in the nursery, and Aileen pulls the one-year-old to safety. Mr. Gray and his scientist friends celebrate the rescue, debating whether the animal acted out of instinct or reason. Then their discussion turns to another matter: Is the ability to see located in a certain area of dogs’ brains? When Mr. Gray’s wife and children go on vacation, the scientists use Aileen’s newly born puppy to find out.

The experiment is gruesomely successful. “Suddenly the puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted: ‘There, I’ve won—confess it! He’s as blind as a bat!’” Twain wrote. “And they all said: ‘It’s so—You’ve proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you a great debt from henceforth,’ and they crowded around him, and wrung his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.” Aileen, the dog that had saved her owner’s child, is rewarded with the killing of her own. Confused about why her puppy is buried in the yard, she grows sick with grief and dies.

Twain’s tragic fable poignantly articulated the writer’s concerns about animal experimentation—his fear, in some cases justified, that men of science were blithely maiming innocent creatures to settle banal scientific disagreements. The National Anti-Vivisection Society, a group that formed in London in 1875 to protest animal experimentation, reprinted A Dog’s Tale in its campaigns to shut down laboratories.

For peak emotional impact, the society’s choice to highlight dogs was smart, as the animals have been human companions for thousands of years. Research even suggests that their brow bones evolved so that we might register their facial expressions more sympathetically. In February of last year, a similar choice was made at a congressional meeting of the Committee of Oversight and Government Reform.

At the hearing, which was called “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer-Funded Animal Cruelty,” three beagle puppies—Nellie, Oliver, and Beasley—sat behind the witnesses testifying. Led by Republican Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina, the hour-long meeting harshly critiqued the use of taxpayer dollars going to research that uses animals, particularly dogs. “The beagles are a reminder of the real costs of animal experimentation,” Mace said in her opening statement.

Nancy Mace has said that animal testing unites the “QAnon side of the party and the socialist squad.” peta recently sent flowers to the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya.

As a conservative who once described herself as “Trump in high heels,” Mace may seem an odd champion of animal rights, an issue stereotypically associated with left-leaning groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which opposes animal testing as well as hunting, eating meat, and wearing fur or leather. But since Donald Trump first took office, the right has increasingly embraced ending the use of animals in scientific research and toxicity testing. In a 2021 press conference, Mace said that animal testing unites the “QAnon side of the party and the socialist squad.” PETA recently sent flowers to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, and issued a press release with images of posters that said Thank You, President Trump.

During Trump’s second term, the Navy ended testing on dogs and cats, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started phasing out its monkey research. In April 2025, the United States Food and Drug Administration announced a goal of replacing the animals on which new drugs are tested with “new approach methodologies,” or NAMs, over the next three to five years. In March of this year, it released draft guidance for how companies could include NAMs in new drug applications. (NAMs include human organs-on-a-chip, which reproduce the microenvironment of an organ inside a plastic computer chip; organoids, which are miniature versions of human tissue; computer modeling; AI; and other technologies that mimic the body.) The NIH announced that it wouldn’t fund new grants that use only animal models; proposals must also use human-focused approaches, like NAMs. And in early 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency, which helps determine whether pesticides or other products are toxic, promised to end mammalian animal testing entirely by 2035.

What exactly is going on with the right’s focus on animal welfare? The exact number of animals involved per year in the United States for testing isn’t well accounted for, but it is certainly in the millions. Although the majority are rodents, others, including rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, and nonhuman primates, are used, too. There are plenty of reasons to want to reduce this number. Not only can experimentation lead to the suffering and death of the animals involved, but the findings from nonhuman animals don’t always translate to humans—especially when it comes to drug development. Many medications fail when they move from animal models to humans, and scientific advancements have dramatically improved the available alternatives to animal testing. The government’s latest moves have “opened up possibilities that I, for one, never imagined,” said a senior policy adviser at the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Eric Kleiman.

But the question of why the government has taken such an interest is complicated. The push originates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he is “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” “I actually believe he cares,” Sam Halabi, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Health and the director of the Center for Transformational Health Law, told me. “He’s been on record for a long time saying he cares about the treatment of animals.” At the same time, scientific decision-making in the Trump administration has been fraught, to say the least. It’s often mixed with politics, as Halabi and his co-authors pointed out in a 2026 paper in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law: “The current period is defined by an alarming intensification of partisan antagonism, administrative disinvestment, and strategic delegitimization.”

Animal testing hasn’t been immune to that trend. At the congressional hearing, Mace repeatedly fixated on “transgender mice,” or mice used in studies on transgender-related health issues, such as susceptibility to HIV and drug overdoses. “The Biden-Harris administration spent 2.5 million taxpayer dollars to study the fertility of transgender mice,” she said, referencing studies that examine the reproductive health of rodents given hormones. “Let that sink in.” Republican Representative Lauren Boebert raised concerns about animal experiments that incorporated fetal tissue from elective abortions and called for more investigation. (It’s worth noting that the fetal tissue would otherwise be medical waste; no abortions are performed in order to obtain it.)

A meaningful reduction in animal testing would require massive investment and policy innovation in drug testing and basic research. Instead, the Trump administration has cut millions in scientific grants.

A meaningful reduction in animal testing would require massive investment and policy innovation in drug testing and basic research. Instead, the Trump administration has cut millions in scientific grants. As of March, the FDA had given 74 percent fewer new grants this fiscal year compared to the fiscal years between 2021 and 2024, in part as a result of sweeping layoffs, according to an analysis from Johns Hopkins. The proposed NIH budget has been slashed by billions of dollars. It’s reasonable to wonder whether the rightful desire to reduce the use of animals will be paired with the appropriate resources needed for it to happen at all.

Humans have relied on animals to gain scientific knowledge at least since ancient Greece, when it was forbidden to dissect humans, and physicians turned to beasts instead. Sometimes the use of animals introduced errors into anatomical knowledge, but much of what we know about the human body came from animal dissection. To take one example, William Harvey, a doctor to Kings James I and Charles I, performed experiments on many live creatures, including dogs, eels, and crows, which showed, in 1628, how blood circulated, contradicting accepted facts that went back to Galen. When he removed the beating heart from a living animal, he saw that it was more like a pump propelling blood than an organ sucking blood in. His experiments took place before the invention of anesthesia.

As investigations into physiology and anatomy multiplied, Enlightenment thinkers began to consider the animals’ role in the studies. In Of Duties to Animals and Spirits, Immanuel Kant wrote that vivisection was cruel, but its aim was “praiseworthy.” Any cruelty to animals for “sport” was not justified. Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian who believed that people’s actions should lead to the greatest happiness, concerned himself with the misery of such experiments. He wrote, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Often led by women, the anti-vivisection movement gained prominence in the nineteenth century. Adherents opposed, among other practices, the dissection of animals in public lectures by figures like François........

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