White Coat Waste Exposes USDA Secrecy Scandal
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

White Coat Waste
February 2017

For months, White Coat Waste has been working with a bipartisan group of House and Senate members to improve transparency and accountability about taxpayer-funded animal experiments. Now, this work is more important than ever. With the USDA blackout, we have no way of knowing how many dogs, cats and other animals are being abused in laboratories.

February 3, 2017, the White Coat Waste Project was on Capitol Hill with a bipartisan group of Congress members celebrating the introduction of important new legislation, the FACT Act, to increase transparency about secretive and wasteful government animal testing.

Ironically, February 4, 3017, we woke up to the discovery that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had – without notice or any cogent explanation - taken down its entire animal welfare database.

We immediately notified reporters and soon the story was viral with coverage from the Associated Press, Nature, Science, the Dodo, the Washington Post and others.

WCW explained how the now-defunct USDA website contained critical information about how many dogs, cats, monkeys and other large mammals are used in government laboratories and other taxpayer-funded experimentation facilities, whether they are subjected to pain, and whether the facilities are in compliance with federal animal welfare laws (a condition of receiving taxpayer funding). While it was far from perfect, WCW relied heavily on this resource to identify waste and abuse, including for our high-profile exposé of dog experimentation by the Department of Veterans Affairs and other government agencies.

For months, we’ve been working with a bipartisan group of House and Senate members to improve transparency and accountability about taxpayer-funded animal experiments. Now, this work is more important than ever. With the USDA blackout, we have no way of knowing how many dogs, cats and other animals are being abused in laboratories.

This is not a partisan issue. A recent national poll found that two-thirds of voters—73% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats—want more transparency about taxpayer-funded animal testing and that six in 10 want to cut federal funding for animal experiments.

Please write your members of Congress and urge them to cosponsor the FACT Act to secure much-needed transparency about taxpayer-funded animal experiments! 

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