(Beth Clifton collage)
NIH budget cuts might mean fewer animals used––or just worse care
WASHINGTON D.C.; BOSTON, Massachusetts; YEMASSEE, South Carolina––With the biomedical research world focused on Donald Trump administration cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for laboratory “overhead,” a big hidden question with no obvious answers is “What does this mean for animals?”
Does the Trump administration funding cut mean fewer animals will be used in biomedical research and testing?
Or does it just mean that animals already in laboratories will get less care?
The answer is very likely both
Reality is that no one can even make a well-educated guess until the extent and terms of the budget cuts are thrashed out in court.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Judge blocks cuts––temporarily, anyhow
Massachusetts federal district judge Angel Kelley late on February 10, 2025 “temporarily blocked the National Institutes of Health from implementing steep cuts to how medical research grants are funded, after 22 states sued to stop the change,” reported Alexander Tin for CBS News.
Kelley, nominated to the federal bench by former U.S. president Joe Biden in 2021, halted the cuts “pending further court arguments from states and the Trump administration,” Tin said.
“A hearing is scheduled for February 21, 2025,” Tin added.
The National Institutes of Health, the major funder of biomedical research in the U.S., distributed to more than 2,800 laboratories at hospitals, universities, and other institutions, on February 7, 2025 promised to save the U.S. government more than $4 billion a year by capping at 15% funding for “indirect costs” associated with research grants.
This would be barely half of the recently reported average of about 28%.
(Beth Clifton collage)
$9 billion of NIH funding went for “indirect” costs
“Last year,” explained Max Kozlov, Dan Garisto, and Heidi Ledford for Nature, “the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, awarded $26 billion directly to scientists to help them pay workers’ salaries and buy equipment and reagents for their laboratories, while $9 billion went to these overhead, or indirect, costs, to help institutions run their facilities and cover administrative fees.
“The historical average indirect costs rate has been about 40%,” the Nature team said, citing a figure significantly higher than other sources, “and goes up to 75% for some institutions.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
What’s the difference?
Expenses associated with animal acquisition, care, and use are typically split between the “direct” and “indirect” costs of experiments.
For example, “direct” costs may include purchasing mice or monkeys, and for whatever is done with them during a research project.
“Indirect” costs might include maintaining the laboratory, including paying for heating, lighting, water supply, clean-up, and biosecurity.
Further, if animals acquired and used in one experiment remain healthy enough at the end of the experiment to become part of a permanent institutional research colony, “indirect” costs of later experiments using those animals, or their offspring, might include the animals’ care, feeding, veterinary care, and other upkeep expenses until they are used again in another funded project.
Matthew J. Memoli, M.D., M.S
(Beth Clifton collage)
Animal care is not “administrative overhead”
Acting National Institutes of Health director Matthew Memoli, a National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases researcher, is best known for having opposed COVID-19 vaccination mandates in July 2021, refusing himself to be vaccinated.
Explained Memoli in the memo announcing the “indirect” funding cap, the cap is meant to “ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”
But what Memoli dismissed as “administrative overhead” is life itself to tens of thousands of animals in research colonies, many of them not currently being used in experiments, who rather than being retired from laboratory use are likely to just be killed if the budget cuts go through.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Beth Clifton collage)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Indirect” research costs “have risen steadily since the 1960s,” the Nature team explained, “in part because of an increasing number of regulations governing laboratory research and how federal funds are spent, including “to protect animal welfare.”
Susan Collins, a Republican U.S. Senator from Maine, told media that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated by Donald Trump to head the Department of Health & Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health, may undo the cuts announced by Memoli.
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote by February 13, 2025 on whether to confirm Kennedy, whose nomination has been controversial primarily because of his general opposition to vaccinations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also an advocate of raw milk, a leading vector for both viral and bacterial infections in humans.
(Beth Clifton collage)
110 million animals per year
U.S. laboratories annually use about 110 million of the estimated 192 million rodents, mostly mice, used in labs worldwide, according to Cruelty Free International, along with more than 700,000 animals of species tracked under the Animal Welfare Act, among them about 72,000 nonhuman primates, 45,000 dogs, and 12,600 cats.
The toll also includes about 14 million fish and birds, who along with rats and mice are not tracked.
Private sector funding for laboratory animal use is extensive but undocumented. Almost all funding for laboratory animal use that can be documented comes through the National Institutes of Health.
But a reduction of animal use in experiments appears to be as likely to come through legislation specifically targeting animal use as through budget cuts that do not change animal testing mandates.
(Beth Clifton collage)
FDA Modernization 3.0
“Very quick out of the gate in the new 119th Congress, a bipartisan group of eight lawmakers — led by U.S. Senators Cory Booker, Eric Schmitt, and Rand Paul,” a Democrat and two Republicans— have reintroduced the FDA Modernization 3.0,” exulted Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle on February 2, 2025.
“That’s the same band of lawmakers,” Pacelle said, “with a commitment to reform animal testing who worked to pass the same bill in the Senate” in the 118th Congress.
“Unfortunately,” Pacelle continued, “leaders of the U.S. House didn’t pass that Senate measure, even though the House bill had deep and broad bipartisan support.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“The FDA is not implementing the law”
“It was just more than two years ago,” Pacelle recalled, “that Senators Paul and Booker led the effort to pass the Food & Drug Administration Modernization Act 2.0 to eliminate an animal-testing mandate for all new development of pharmaceutical drugs — accounting for perhaps 75% of all animal testing.”
However, Pacelle charged earlier, in November 2024, “The Food & Drug Administration is not implementing the new law, as Congress demanded of it. The FDA has not, more to the point, lifted a finger to update its regulations to allow for the use of 21st-century animal-free methods to screen new drugs,” leading to the introduction of the Food & Drug Administration Modernization Act 3.0.
Pacelle blamed Food & Drug Administration intransigence on “companies that profit from selling animals to laboratories, desperately clinging to their lucrative business. Charles River Laboratories and Alpha Genesis, to name two companies in this space,” Pacelle charged, “want to keep selling animals to labs even if the work does little good for patients in need.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Alpha Genesis
At the time, 43 rhesus macaques had just escaped from an Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee, South Carolina. The last of the macaques were reportedly recaptured on January 25, 2025, having never actually left a wooded buffer zone surrounding their housing.
(See Behind the Alpha Genesis monkey “great escape” & recaptures.)
While those rhesus macaques were at large, reported Karl Puckett for the Island Packet on February 5, 2025, another 22 rhesus macaques died at the Alpha Genesis facility in November 2024.
This led to Alpha Genesis receiving a USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS] citation for an alleged critical violation of the federal Animal Welfare Act.
Wrote Puckett, “In a report on the incident, the USDA said the monkeys appeared to have died from carbon monoxide exposure. A heating unit had been placed inside of an interior field cage.
“At this time,” Puckett added, “APHIS does not have an open investigation for Alpha Genesis, spokesman R. Andre Bell said.”
Beth & Merritt Clifton with friends.
Alleges People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Despite receiving $19 million in contracts from the National Institutes of Health, Alpha Genesis has repeatedly failed to meet even the most basic animal welfare standards.”
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