By
Madeleine May,
Madeleine May
Investigative Producer
Madeleine May is an investigative producer at CBS News based in Washington, D.C. She previously covered politics for VICE News and reported on organized crime and corruption for OCCRP. She covers threats to democracy, disinformation, political violence, and extremism.
Marilyn Thompson
September 22, 2025 / 6:37 PM EDT
/ CBS News
This story is a CBS News collaboration with the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina.
The Trump administration has canceled nearly $28 million of federal grants for animal testing as major federal health agencies are phasing out research on live animals in favor of new alternatives, a joint investigation by CBS News and The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, has found.
“We’re witnessing a watershed moment right now,” said Justin Goodman, the senior vice president of White Coat Waste, an animal rights nonprofit. “We have an administration that’s skeptical of spending, skeptical of establishment science. … We are trying to slash and burn as much animal testing funding as possible.”
The pressure for change comes from an unlikely coalition of animal rights activists and bipartisan members of Congress who want to halt what animal rights groups estimate as $20 billion a year in federal spending for animal experiments. Long considered a cause of the left, the animal rights movement has expanded and gained steam under the Trump administration. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is leading the charge against high drug costs, vaccine safety and the grinding approval process required to bring innovations to market.
Animal tests, often involving painful experiments that end in euthanasia, have played a crucial role in developing novel vaccines for COVID-19, malaria, polio and popular medications such as Tylenol and Ozempic, which ushered in a craze for weight-loss drugs.
“In conventional medicine, those procedures, those diagnostics, those therapeutics, for the most part, were discovered in animals,” said Steven Marks, the dean of the veterinary school at Clemson University. “But they’re changing the landscape of human health right now.”
No one knows where it will end.
Since President Trump took office, all major federal health agencies have promised to phase out animal research, with varying degrees of effectiveness. The Veterans Administration says it is on track, as promised, to end all primate research that’s been used to develop new treatments for neurological disorders, alcoholism and mental problems.
The sprawling National Institutes of Health has agreed to phase out experiments with dogs, cats and primates, but watchdogs have found recent examples of the agency launching new animal research. Federal money has continued to flow to incomplete research projects and to contractors who breed and care for thousands of animals bound for laboratories.
The effort has sparked uncertainty in South Carolina, where a research company maintains a free-ranging monkey colony on secluded Morgan Island, where nearly 4,000 federally owned rhesus monkeys bask in the sun until they are shipped off to federal laboratories.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Charleston Republican, has been a leader in the animal rights fight, joined by White Coat Waste, a group that counts billionaire Elon Musk among its supporters. Mace has introduced legislation to end federally funded animal research. She also recently inserted language in a House spending bill to force the NIH to justify continued spending on Morgan Island, which is more popularly known as “Monkey Island.”
“Honestly, it’s heartbreaking,” Goodman told CBS News and The Post and Courier on a recent visit to waters surrounding the island.
As Goodman watched, rhesus mothers and babies romped on the island’s sandy beach and stared down from palmetto trees. But each year, hundreds are “taken from this wild habitat with their friends, with their families and shipped to laboratories. They’re gonna be socially isolated in tiny cages by themselves and subjected to some of the most barbaric painful experiments you can imagine,” he said.
His group’s mission, Goodman said, is to “slash as much animal funding as possible.”
Patients who stand to benefit from continued animal research hang in the balance. Animal experiments have helped develop breakthrough drugs, like the immunotherapy that’s saving the life of 11-month-old Max Harbin of Folly Beach, South Carolina. Max has a spinal condition that once ranked as the leading genetic cause of infant deaths.
Before Max’s therapy was approved for pediatric use in 2019, it went through years of studies with mice and monkeys. A Food and Drug Administration official described the therapy as a way to “change the lives of those patients who may have faced a terminal condition.”
Max’s mother Laura, an animal lover, said she was unaware of the rigorous animal experiments that led to human approval for Zolgensma, a single-dose therapy made by Novartis.
“It’s odd to think that it’s a step in the process, but it’s a necessary one, and without it, my son would be in a very, very different place. I’m definitely grateful there’s a way to test it so we know it’s safe.”
Now, the FDA is now among the agencies promising to make a “paradigm shift” in how new drugs are approved.
It wants to use new techniques like AI-based computational modeling, lab testing on human organs and data analysis to “get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably while also reducing R&D costs and drug prices,” said FDA commissioner Martin Makary. “It is a win-win for public health and ethics.”
There’s still a major hurdle with phasing out all federal animal research. The science behind alternatives is rapidly evolving, but many experts say it’s not yet ready to serve as the only gauge of safety and effectiveness in humans.
“I want to see us get out of the business of using animals in research,” said Paul Locke, who is an environmental health lawyer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and serves on the board of the school’s Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. “The question is when. When can we do that and reach the double goal of having better science and virtually no animals? The answer is not tomorrow.”
Locke testified this year at a congressional hearing organized by Mace about the need for federal agencies to step up in support of alternative research and “set the global standards in these fields.”
The hearing won more attention, including supportive social media posts from President Trump, about Mace’s charge that the federal government spent more than $10 million to create transgender mice and other animals and study their behaviors.
Parents like Justin and Rosalyn Porcano in San Rafael, California, are watching the debate with concern. Their 7-year-old daughter Lia has a rare genetic disorder, Usher Syndrome 1B. She was born deaf and is facing blindness, with no treatments currently available. Without medical advancements in treatment of the disorder, she will likely go blind by the time she’s in high school.
The Porcanos found a primate researcher at the Oregon National Primate Research Center who, with the family’s help, is developing a model that will allow for development of an effective treatment. The lab work is ongoing as the debate in Washington intensifies.
The couple, who run a nonprofit called Save Sight Now that is dedicated to finding treatments for Usher Syndrome 1B, said they would prefer an alternative to animal testing, but it makes no sense to them to pause research until a better solution comes along. Lia doesn’t have that luxury of time, Rosalyn Porcano said.
“Until technology and science has a better solution for testing, I think that’s idiotic,” said Justin Porcano. “You can’t just stop testing in all animal models right now. It’s a crazy concept.”
Post and Courier Reporter Mitchell Black contributed to this report.
Madeleine May is an investigative producer at CBS News based in Washington, D.C. She previously covered politics for VICE News and reported on organized crime and corruption for OCCRP. She covers threats to democracy, disinformation, political violence, and extremism.
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