Congress pushing EPA to set new timeline for ending animal testing

Congress is preparing a bipartisan punishment for the EPA over its backsliding on deadlines to phase out animal testing.

House lawmakers have written language into the report accompanying their funding bill for the Environmental Protection Agency saying they are “concerned” about the agency’s decision to eliminate a 2025 deadline for reducing testing on dogs and rabbits, as well as another 2035 deadline for ending mammal testing altogether.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers had been pushing for the language.

They said as recently as three years ago the EPA was on board with the phaseout and was even moving to retire the rabbits it kept for testing at its lab in North Carolina. But the Biden administration reversed the phaseout and derailed the rabbit retirement plans, saying the bunnies can’t be resettled.

Now Congress is poised to order the EPA to report on its current animal-testing plans and to deliver a timeline to Capitol Hill.

The funding bill, which covers the EPA and the Interior Department, cleared committee earlier this month and is scheduled to reach the floor of the House this upcoming week.

“Reducing the EPA’s unnecessary use of animals in federally funded testing is a win for animals and taxpayers,” said Rep. Ken Calvert, a California Republican who helped secure the new provision. “I am pleased that we are making progress toward getting the Biden EPA back on track to eliminating unnecessary and inhumane animal tests.”

The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group that polices government spending on animal testing, called EPA’s approach to testing “archaic.”

The group exposed the EPA’s backsliding in December, uncovering documents showing the agency had retreated on the phaseout deadlines and had euthanized a bunny, Jasper, rather than retire him.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund EPA’s wasteful animal testing resurgence exposed by WCW including boondoggles like pumping animals’ lungs full of firearms emissions and wildfire smoke and butchering healthy bunnies after using them as sperm donors,” said Anthony Bellotti the group’s founder and president.

The Washington Times has reached out to the EPA for comment.

EPA uses animal testing to help determine toxicity levels from exposure to chemicals and pesticides. But some scientists say alternatives, known as New Approach Methods, are on their way to supplanting animal testing.

The Trump administration in 2019 had put the EPA on track to curtail mammal testing by 30% by next year, and to end it altogether by 2035. The Trump EPA in early 2021 also issued a directive that the rabbits kept for testing at the agency’s North Carolina lab be given a “retirement in place” once researchers were done with them.

The White Coat Waste Project had offered to place the rabbits in homes, including covering the costs, but the EPA rejected the idea. The agency then began new experiments on rabbits, collecting their sperm for research on a drop in human semen quality. Rabbit sperm is “quite similar” to human sperm, the researchers said.

The EPA has said the rabbits will be retired once research is done. But the sperm experiment proposal said they would be euthanized.

In explaining its reversal on the testing deadlines, the EPA says its scientists disagreed with the Trump-era deadlines.

“While the goals/dates in the original work plan may have been intended to spur focus and action, the dates themselves became the primary focus of discussion within the scientific and stakeholder communities as opposed to what actions or path the Agency should take to reduce the use of animals while still remaining fully protective of human health and the environment,” the EPA said. “As a result, the goals/dates were removed to shift the focus towards these actions as represented by the objectives, strategies, and deliverables outlined in the document.”

The agency’s reversal came after pushback against the deadlines by some core Biden political allies in the environmental and social justice world, who said animal testing is needed to deliver rulings on the safety of chemicals.

Critics counter that erasing deadlines is tantamount to giving up on the phaseout.

“It’s not going to change, and we’re not going to move away from animal testing unless we have a hard and fast date,” Andrew Wheeler, the Trump EPA chief who set the deadlines, told the White Coat Waste Project.

Language in appropriations reports does not have binding force of law, but is usually considered a stern directive that lawmakers want to see followed.

Congress is asking the EPA to report within 180 days after the spending bill is signed into law on “progress the Agency has made since 2021 to reduce animal testing.”

“The report should include changes in animal use, annual costs of the Agency’s animal testing, a timeline for the further reduction and replacement of testing on vertebrate animals, and a description of Agency efforts to retire animals no longer needed for research,” the legislative language says.

That tracks closely with suggestions made by a bipartisan group of lawmakers this spring.

Led by Rep. Lisa C. McClain, Michigan Republican, the group said the testing reversal is not backed by science, and undercuts Biden EPA Administrator Michael Regan’s own testimony to Congress in 2021 where he said he was “strongly committed” to reducing animal testing.