When Anthony Bellotti, a Republican strategist and devoted cat owner, set out to defend animal rights, he deployed a game plan designed to enlist conservatives to the cause.
His nonprofit, White Coat Waste Project, founded in 2011, painted animal studies as government waste. It targeted Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a tactic that paid off during the coronavirus pandemic, as Dr. Fauci became a lightning rod. The group spotlighted experiments on beagles and dug up grants for hormone studies on mice, proclaiming them “bizarre transgender animal experiments.”
To the chagrin of biomedical scientists who say animal research is essential for human health, the Trump administration is listening. After decades of being dismissed by many conservatives as a project of the political left, the cause of animal rights is being embraced by leading figures in President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, albeit in a way that fits into their anti-government, pro-meat-eating ethos.
On Mr. Trump’s watch, a string of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Department and the Food and Drug Administration, have taken steps to curb animal research. So has the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.
The work of White Coat Waste is only part of the story. Years of advocacy are paying off, animal rights activists say, and the broader movement against animal abuse and testing is also getting a boost from the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. Three cabinet secretaries appeared on Ms. Trump’s Fox News show in December to announce a multiagency “strike force” to crack down on abusive puppy mills. The administration also recently announced plans to “end dog fighting once and for all.”
The push to limit animal experiments stems partly from growing public opposition to the research, and technological advances that could eliminate the need for animals. The Trump administration is also quietly cooperating with long-established animal welfare groups, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which has spent decades cultivating allies on both the left and the right.
“I would not assume that animal welfare, animal protection, is more associated with the liberal side,” said Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, whose 2002 book “Dominion” makes a moral case for animal welfare. “It is kind of a shared concern, though I would say it is equally disregarded. Its importance is underrated within both parties.”
Far-reaching implications
The changes could have major effects on the way drugs are approved and biomedical research is conducted in the United States. The F.D.A., for instance, recently announced that it will no longer require certain monoclonal antibodies to be tested on nonhuman primates, a move that the agency says will translate into lower drug prices.
The N.I.H. is also taking steps to reduce the use of nonhuman primates, mostly rhesus macaques, rattling scientists who say such research has been responsible for advances in stroke and spinal cord injuries; deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s patients; vaccines against Zika and Ebola; a cure for hepatitis C; cochlear implants for deaf people; in vitro fertilization; and treatments for depression.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has embraced the idea. Last spring, he met with leaders of PETA who urged him to turn a network of seven N.I.H.-supported primate research centers into animal sanctuaries.
Last month, the N.I.H. approached the Oregon Health and Science University, which runs the largest primate research center in the federal network, to explore the possibility of turning the center into a sanctuary. The university’s board convened a special meeting, and voted to initiate talks with the N.I.H. about whether to do so, though no decisions have been made.
“We were just completely blindsided — in total shock,” said Nancy L. Haigwood, a longtime H.I.V. researcher who ran the center until 2022. Dr. Haigwood is currently collaborating with Johns Hopkins University researchers on an N.I.H. supported study using rhesus macaques to develop an antibody therapy that could cure H.I.V. in babies.PETA is celebrating. “This is something we have worked on for many, many years,” said Kathy Guillermo, the group’s senior vice president of laboratory investigations.
Of White Coat Waste, she added, “You will think, after talking to them, that nobody’s ever thought of doing this.”
Making Fauci a target
Mr. Bellotti and Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s lobbyist, are not shy about describing their strategy. In 2020, as Covid-19 spread globally, they set out to learn whether Dr. Fauci’s institute was funding research in China, where the virus originated. Their work helped fuel the “lab leak” theory of the pandemic, and put Dr. Fauci on the hot spot.
In 2021, White Coat Waste Project claimed Dr. Fauci’s institute funded experiments in Tunisia in which beagles were attacked by sand flies in order to study leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease the flies carried. The institute said at first that it wasn’t true.
But photos of beagles, their heads trapped in mesh cages, went viral, causing an uproar on Capitol Hill. White Coat Waste later produced documents showing the beagle experiments had in fact been taxpayer-funded, though the studies were approved at a level far below Dr. Fauci. The media-savvy Mr. Bellotti called it “Beagle-gate.”
“All of a sudden, now this guy who was a villain to me,” Mr. Goodman said, became “a villain to millions and millions and millions of people across the country.”
Dr. Fauci, who retired from government service at the end of 2022, declined to comment.
During an address to a joint session of Congress last year, the president complained that the N.I.H. had spent “$8 million for making mice transgender” echoing claims made by Elon Musk in his DOGE cost-cutting efforts. Mr. Musk, in turn, was echoing White Coat Waste.
The phrase was shorthand for an N.I.H.-funded study that used mice as models for humans to explore whether transgender men who had received testosterone could still have babies. White Coat Waste publicized the study, whose title included the phrase “transgender mouse model,” and others like it. That prompted Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, to convene a hearing and invite Mr. Goodman to testify.
White Coat Waste also has a powerful ally among commentators on the right: Laura Loomer, the hard-right activist and podcaster who has Mr. Trump’s ear. To make White Coat Waste’s case on Capitol Hill, she and Mr. Goodman brought beagles — bred for research, they said — to meet with lawmakers.
An appeal to pet lovers
Rather than pick fights with factory farms, or advocate a vegan diet — “I’m never going to be a vegan or a vegetarian,” Ms. Loomer said — White Coat Waste has made gains by highlighting the work of the sliver of government researchers who experiment on a cuddlier set: cats, dogs and primates.
“What I was taught was, you have to find a new way to talk about an old issue,” Mr. Bellotti said, referring to his training in politics. “We’re single issue. We come to the table with an idea that government is the problem, not the solution.”
Last spring, Mr. Bellotti said, he worked with Ms. Loomer to slip information about dog and cat testing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His group had been campaigning for years to end the research, he said, including experiments on cats conducted by the Navy to study erectile dysfunction, constipation and incontinence.
In May, Navy Secretary John Phelan announced he was “ending these inhumane experiments and saving taxpayer dollars.”
White Coat Waste’s main target now is the N.I.H. The agency’s director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has drawn praise from leaders of PETA and another animal rights group, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, for closing the last beagle laboratory on the N.I.H. campus and is directing money away from animal studies and toward alternatives to animal research.
But when Dr. Bhattacharya spoke at a conference for conservatives in September, a correspondent for Ms. Loomer’s podcast, ran him down with a camera, calling out, “You’re continuing Fauci’s torture labs!” Ms. Loomer posted the video on social media.
Computer models and ‘organoids’
Scientists are making strides in developing alternatives to animal testing. They are using computer models and have learned how to coax human stem cells into small, three-dimensional clumps, known as organoids, that display some of the same basic traits as a specific human organ, such as a brain, a lung or a kidney, and are useful in testing.
Dr. Haigwood, of Oregon Health and Science University, is skeptical. “These new approaches are not ready for prime time,” she said. “We would love them if they were available. But we’re never going to be able to make a brain on a chip, or an immune system on a chip.”
At N.I.H., Dr. Bhattacharya recently created a new office to encourage the development of alternatives to animal testing, and put Nicole Kleinstreuer, an N.I.H. toxicologist who has long advocated such alternatives, in charge of overseeing it.
During a webinar last spring, Dr. Kleinstreuer said N.I.H. would no longer solicit proposals for research that relies exclusively on animals and was making plans for “sustainable adoption” of animals from shuttered labs.
Still, it is not enough for Mr. Bellotti, who calls N.I.H. “the black sheep” of the Trump administration and insists it is moving too slowly. His group has repeatedly taken aim at Dr. Kleinstreuer, who was reportedly the target of death threats last year.
In a social media post last month, White Coat Waste singled out a study devised to test a blood substitute that could save the lives of stroke victims. The researcher who submitted the proposal wrote that canines had long been used in stroke research.
On Dr. Kleinstreuer’s watch, White Coat Waste complained, N.I.H. “approved $596K in new funding for a shocking experiment to deliberately induce the ‘most severe stroke’ in dogs, then k*ll them.” It said it would not “stop until she is held accountable for her defiance of the promises that Trump and RFK Jr. campaigned on.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services declined to make Dr. Kleinstreuer available for comment. The attacks on her prompted a former donor to White Coat Waste, Jim Greenbaum, a former telecom executive who Mr. Bellotti has called his “Funding Father,” to denounce the group last year for what he called “a relentless smear campaign” against Dr. Kleinstreuer.
‘She’s my soul cat’
An effusive man with a thick head of dark hair and passing resemblance to the 1950s crooner Jerry Vale, Mr. Bellotti has known since he was 17 that he wanted to fight for animal rights. The decision, he said, was forged by his experience as an intern in a hospital animal testing lab.
When he went to school for political consulting, a professor told him that if he wanted to work for candidates, he would need to “pick a side.” He became a Republican, he said, figuring that Democrats in animal rights were “a dime a dozen.”
He founded White Coat Waste after helping to elect Republicans including Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, and hired Mr. Goodman away from PETA. The group took in $5.9 million in revenue in 2024 and spent $5.3 million, according to tax filings. Mr. Bellotti would not disclose its donors.
He runs White Coat Waste from his waterfront condominium on the New Jersey Shore, where he lives with his partner and two adopted cats.
He rescued one of them, a 13-year-old white, gray and pink short hair named Delilah, from a Department of Agriculture laboratory that his group helped shut down in 2019. The number 87 — a laboratory identification number, Mr. Bellotti said — is tattooed in blue ink inside Delilah’s ears, a reminder of her government service.
“She’s my soul cat,” Mr. Bellotti said, gently stroking the cat’s fur as she snuggled next to him on a couch. “My life,” he added, “is for the defense of the domestic short hair.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a correspondent based in Washington for The New York Times, covering Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump’s health agenda.
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