Remember #Beaglegate? They're about to do something even worse to cats.
Meet the new NIH boss, same as the old boss
⚠️ Graphic content warning: This post discusses horrific findings involving animal testing, including the use of kittens in NIH-funded experiments.
Over the weekend, we went home to visit my parents. While playing in their pool, the subject of what my eight and ten year old step-daughters want to be when they grow up arose. (Given that school resumes Monday, we typically have them make a sign listing their dream job). Last year, the youngest wanted to be a Samoyed breeder — a line of work I readily supported given our mutual obsession with our own three year old Sammie. This year, it seems she has her sights set on being the first female president. Shortly before she told us this, she had been caught in a lie regarding some makeup products she was supposed to be sharing with her sister. So when she stated her new goal, my mom quickly retorted, “well, you’re already good at lying, I guess you’re halfway there!”
Just like the sun rises, politicians break promises.
We all know it to be true, but still, it’s hard not to let yourself hope this time around will be different. As a politically homeless individual, I had little to be excited about this past election, but I tried to invest my attention and energies into policies and areas of reform where I could be supportive of whomever won. When Trump secured the job I thought we’d at least get some deregulation, energy development, and that he’d clean out the dirty bureaucrats who’ve been subverting the will of most sane Americans for decades.
Nowhere did the latter need to happen more than at agencies like the NIH.
Before the pandemic, most Americans paid little attention to the operations over there (me included), despite its $48 billion budget. But over time, as it became clear that its leadership (primarily Dr. Anthony Fauci) funded illegal gain-of-function research (which is animal torture), lied about it, and then used our own tax dollars against us in an effort to cover that up, people started to wake up.
Over the past five years, the information coming out about the agency has been like an iceberg of corruption, each story worse than the last. Taxpayer dollars to torture beagles, then monkeys, then amputating healthy cat limbs, replacing them with prosthetics, electroshocking muscles, and forcing them to walk before being euthanized.
We knew government was bad beforehand, but most of us were blissfully unaware that we were “funding mad scientists” level bad.
So when Trump announced a new leader for the organization, one who had been an outspoken critic of the NIH and its practices, people like me were beyond relieved. We were thrilled. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya took over the department earlier this year and began making media statements that indicated the taxpayer funds for disgusting animal torture experiments may soon dry up.
During a Fox News interview in early May 2025, Bhattacharya stated that NIH had terminated all the beagle experiments on its campus, referencing stress- and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy research at the NIH Clinical Center. “We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on the NIH campus,” he said.
So called “animal rights” advocacy groups like PCRM and PETA praised the statements, per usual. They tend to operate like trained clapping seals for feds, ready to run cover for these agencies no matter how small the reform.
Meanwhile, the US government remains the top global funder of animal torture and none of these groups have managed to shut down a single intramural government lab, so that should tell you everything you need to know about their “advocacy.”
But, the White Coat Waste Project, a bipartisan group dedicated to ending taxpayer-funded animal torture— and the organization that has been responsible for breaking ALL of these aforementioned investigations into the NIH—waited for actual action.
But that action never came.
As they say, it seems the new boss is the same as the old boss.
Rather than eliminating grants to torture animals or shutting down labs, Bhattacharya has actually been renewing a multitude of Fauci-era labs and funding brand new ones. Despite his claims that he would end dog, cat and primate labs, these operations are instead going strong. In fact, it just came to light that the NIH even extended lethal heart failure experiments on kittens — within days of claiming it was “working tirelessly” to phase out dog and cat testing.
The details of these particular experiments are so gruesome it pains me to write them, but Americans need to know exactly what their money is being used on.
Exclusive documents obtained by WCW through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that an NIH-funded lab at Temple University (in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania) plans to cut open the tiny chests of kittens, pry apart their ribs, and implant bands around their aortas — deliberately inducing heart failure. The NIH-approved protocol calls for 25 kittens (just 8 to 10 weeks old) to be abused for months, then killed by cutting out their hearts while they’re still alive.
They have already spent $4.1 million in taxpayer money on this experiment BEFORE the extension. Temple has actually been draining NIH dollars for similar cat and kitten experiments since 1984 — wasting more than $39 million of taxpayers’ money.
Many are calling this Bhattacharya’s BeagleGate, but I must say it might even be worse.
Perhaps this is hitting me particularly hard because I just recently became a crazy cat lady. My own little buddy is just now 12 weeks old and we got him when he was around 7 weeks. All animal torture turns the stomach, but to think of this happening to kittens Roux’s age has me in shambles, I must admit.
Cats are sadly one of the most frequently abused animals in our society. But no entity is more prolific in torturing cats than our own government with our own dollars.
Other WCW investigations have revealed that the NIH has spent money on:
Infecting cats with COVID and then killing them
Sewing kittens’ eyes shut to cause vision disorders
Breeding kittens to suffer from debilitating genetic disorders that cause loss of muscle control, difficulty walking, vision loss, tremors, and early death
Cutting out cats’ eyes and electroshocking them
While Jay Bhattacharya might be the new boss over at the NIH, it seems Trump didn’t clean house nearly enough. Their animal testing czar (and Jay’s deputy), Nicole Kleinstreuer, is an Obama-era Fauci fanatic who works closely with PETA.
They say you are the company you keep, is it any wonder the NIH’s policies still look the same at Biden’s?
In Washington DC, change is hard to come by. Bureaucrats stay entrenched for decades, they learn the systems, they network, they host the parties. And at the end of the day, it’s a rare newcomer who doesn’t end up trying to appease them and stay in their good graces. They do this to advance their own positions, and because frankly a lot of people who go to DC are nerds and high school rejects who at their core are still trying to fit in with the cool kids and prove something back home.
What else could explain allowing Obama and Biden-era NIH bureaucrats and Fauci acolytes to continue running the show at the NIH despite having the power to clean the joint up?
The truth is the political machine that allowed us to get to this position is still in play. We spend billions on animal torture, and most of that money gets funneled through the labs of our foreign enemies and through higher education. Trump has tried to take a wrecking ball to these entities and for good reason, but he’s being thwarted by the machine despite his best efforts. The mainstream media paints these grants cuts as an attack on science itself rather than exposing the fact that most of this money is spent on needless experiments—their only true purpose is to prop up these institutions financially. Don’t for a second let any hairbrained leftist get on their high horse and run cover for animal torture (trust me, they will try to).
Ending animal torture experiments isn’t politically hard under Trump. Just about every other major agency is doing so rapidly including the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, and the VA. The NIH alone is doubling down on these experiments and expanding them.
It’s going to take more than simple change in figureheads to get the NIH under control. Trump needs to take swift action to stop their reckless and inhumane policies that are only going to lead to the loss of more lives.