Several months ago, a San Diego health care practitioner started sending me emails with reports of what NIH-funded universities are doing to dogs and cats. I’ve been tied up on other things, (as some of you may know), and I finally spent a few attention units on it. For anyone with pets, and even a lick of empathy, this is appalling and outrageous.

Did you know that federal grants pay American research universities to infest beagle puppies with hundreds of ticks and withhold pain relief? To breed kittens with genetic disorders, stick needles in their skulls, and kill them at three months. To cut open eight-week-old kittens’ chests, induce heart failure, and remove their hearts while they’re still beating. Not in some black-budget lab. At the University of Missouri, Auburn, Penn, Temple, Iowa. The same universities your kids apply to!

The White Coat Waste Project has been documenting this for a decade, grant by grant, FOIA request by FOIA request, and nobody in the executive branch has done anything about it. For whatever it’s worth, I think it’s time the new powers-that-be do something like right now. And I’ll propose a very short (by Government standards) approach and timeline.

Congress is on it! (Which means nothing will happen for years.)

There are bills. Collins and Peters introduced the AFTER Act. Mace has the PAAW Act. Malliotakis has HELP PETS. They’re bipartisan, they poll well, and they’re sitting in committee where bipartisan bills that poll well tend to die quiet deaths. Even if one of them passes in this Congress, which it won’t, the regulatory process would take another year on top (at least).
Meanwhile the beagles at Missouri are still on ice with ticks glued to them. The kittens at Temple are still on the table. Nobody in the Senate cloakroom is going to save them.

There are heroes who are already doing the work

There is a rescue network. White Coat Waste exposes the grants and drives the Hill strategy. The Beagle Freedom Project pulls dogs out of labs and places them. Homes for Animal Heroes coordinates retirement across institutions. Best Friends in Utah is the largest no-kill sanctuary in the country. Kaley Cuoco funds shelter work through her Oh Norman brand. Jon Stewart built out Bufflehead Farm with Farm Sanctuary.

These operations know what they’re doing. They’re running on private money and volunteer labor, and they’re full. Every one of them could absorb more animals if somebody paid for the space and the vet bills.

What HHS could AND SHOULD do

Here’s the part that should matter to anyone who reads this at HHS or NIH. The authority to fix this already exists. No new law. No fight with Congress. The Secretary just has to decide it’s worth doing. (And I am hoping that a guy who talks to falcons might be that guy.)

NIH can terminate grants under 2 CFR 200.340. The regulation says so explicitly. The NIH Director has been telling reporters his hands are tied by “legal constraints,” but his own grants policy statement disagrees with him. The Category E experiments, the maximum-pain ones where pain relief is withheld on purpose, are the cleanest place to start. There aren’t that many of them. Pick up the termination authority and use it.

HHS can move money. Section 205 of the FY 2026 Labor-HHS appropriations lets the Secretary transfer 1 percent of discretionary funds between appropriations on 15 days’ notice. One percent of NIH alone is roughly $470 million. We already know this authority works because Kennedy just used it, or something like it, when HHS wound down 22 mRNA vaccine projects in August 2025, which outside observers estimated at nearly half a billion dollars. The money moves when the Secretary wants it to move.

Aim some/more of that money at the sanctuary network. Not a federal program. Not a new bureaucracy. Direct grants to the organizations that are already doing this work, scaled to the actual number of animals in the pipeline, which NIH already knows because it’s in their grant reports.

Announce it with the people who do the work standing on the stage. Cuoco and Stewart show up. So does Best Friends, the Beagle Freedom Project, Homes for Animal Heroes. The coalition becomes visible the moment the people in it are named in the same room.

And then do what the U.S. does better than any country in history: SCALE UP!

Work the phones with Collins, Peters, Mace, Malliotakis, Ernst, Lankford, all the members already on record. Tell them the executive branch is moving and the legislation can follow. That’s how bipartisan bills that poll at 85 percent actually pass.

But it all comes down to somebody with authority has to decide to spend the political capital.

A practical timeline (short by government standards)

First thirty days: Publish the numbers. How many dogs and cats are in active NIH-funded Category D and E research right now. How many are scheduled for disposition in the next twelve months. What it would actually cost to house, treat, and place them instead of killing them. NIH already has this data in grant reports and institutional animal care filings. Publishing it is an administrative act. No new legislation. No congressional fight. Just a decision to be transparent about what the government is doing with taxpayer money.

Next thirty days: Direct an initial tranche of funding to the existing sanctuary and rescue network to start expanding intake. Start with the animals whose grants are already winding down. These are the easiest saves. The experiments end anyway. The only question is needle or sanctuary.

The following thirty days: Create a per-animal reimbursement so any NIH-funded institution that transfers a lab survivor to an approved sanctuary gets paid more than the cost of euthanasia. That one change flips the economics. Post-grant killing stops being a cost-saving measure and starts being the more expensive option. Universities will follow the money. They always do.

After that, the AFTER Act and the PAAW Act provide the durable legislative framework. But by then the sanctuary capacity is already built and animals are already moving out of labs and into placements. Ninety days. That’s the whole plan. The rest is follow-through.

A closing thought

I’m not in the animal welfare movement, (though my non human children Bill and Ruffles have been bugging me to join it for years). I came to this because someone kept sending me material until I paid attention.

Most of the people who would support a fix are in the same position. They’re not activists. They’re people who would be horrified if they knew what was being done to beagles and kittens at their state’s flagship university on their tax dollars, and who don’t know because the institutions are careful not to tell them.

It is cruelly ironic that the country that passes cruelty laws to protect pets from their owners is the same country paying its best universities to do things to those pets that would land a private citizen in prison.

Is anyone listening?

Rick Jaffe, Esq.