President Joe Biden’s environmental regulators have tossed a plan to stop experimental testing on animals, saying they won’t be bound by rules implemented by former President Donald Trump.
The Washington Times on Wednesday reported on a new analysis by the Whitecoat Waste Project (WCW), a watchdog group that is fighting to end federal scientific testing that calls for slaughtering animals.
In its report, WCW noted that under Trump, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency planned to reduce testing on animals by 30% by 2025 and phase it out altogether a decade later.
Yet Biden’s EPA has reversed course, the group argues, and in fact, did so within days of Biden taking office. The agency said it wouldn’t abide by any time restraints and is adhering to “the best available science,” the Times reported.
Related: Op-Ed: Does The Biden Administration Hate Cats?
Biden’s EPA is now “killing rabbits it was supposed to retire,” WCW maintains.
“Now, our investigation has exposed that President Biden’s EPA has scrapped this [Trump] plan and, at the behest of bureaucrats in white lab coats and environmental and social justice groups, is butchering bunnies and sentencing millions of other animals to painful deaths in what’s likely the largest resurgence of taxpayer-funded animal testing in the history of the U.S. government,” Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of WCW, told the Times.
Andrew Wheeler, who ran the EPA under Trump, called signing the order to end animal testing was one of the “proudest moments” he had as the agency’s head. But now seeing his legacy threatened, Wheeler said he believes animal testing may never end.
According to the Times, the EPA uses animals, such as rabbits, to determine toxicity levels of exposure to pesticides and other chemicals at its lab in North Carolina.
Wheeler had pushed the agency to look at alternative testing methods, and he credited the WCW with convincing him to move that direction.
But the Biden administration removed the deadlines to end testing because the timeline itself became problematic for the agency and its supporters — even though current EPA Administrator Michael Regan promised under oath to “remain strongly committed” to ending animal testing.
Read: Rep. Greg Steube Of Florida Leads Bipartisan Effort To End Federal Experiments On Dogs And Cats
The Times reported that 38 left-wing groups — such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund — backed Biden’s play, saying a ban on animal testing would harm “environmental justice communities.”
According to the Times, Biden’s EPA complained that Wheeler’s guidelines to retire the animals was a hardship on researchers who would have to hunt down where to send them.
The WCW stepped up with a plan to adopt the animals, relocate them elsewhere and cover the cost to move them. The EPA rejected that offer.
The Times noted that one the EPA study is looking at sperm production in three male rabbits to better understand why sperm counts in men around the world have dropped.
The EPA essentially lied when asked about the next step. The agency told the Times the rabbits would “retire in place,” yet the documentation of the experiment notes they will be sent to a vet and euthanized.
Two rabbits in the same experiment have already been killed once their usefulness was over.
In its report, the WCW observed, the EPA has “ditched a 2021 plan prompted by WCW to retire healthy rabbits in the agency’s lab and is now senselessly killing them.”
“This about-face undoes years of work by WCW and Congress to end EPA’s wasteful spending and spare the animal testing survivors.”
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