05/16/2026
🔥 “In 2020, WCW got its big break: It spread the news that federal funding had gone to a lab in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic. The Trump administration promptly cut the grants.”
📰 MAHA Is Monkeying Around With Lab Rats
By: Shayla Love
May 4, 2026
The New Republic
The New Republic featured White Coat Waste’s efforts to expose taxpayer-funded animal testing and how they made it a priority for the Trump Administration.
Here are some highlights:
Goodman is the senior vice president of White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that’s attempting to end all animal testing by attacking the cost of such experiments. Last July, he went on Loomer Unleashed, a streaming show hosted by conservative political activist Laura Loomer. During the conversation, he criticized the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for moving too slowly on animal testing, calling out Kleinstreuer in particular. “What’s her name?” Loomer asked. “We want to put her on blast.” Loomer showed a screenshot of her LinkedIn profile. Kleinstreuer later received death threats and had to get 24-hour police protection.
Kleinstreuer’s fatal flaw, according to Goodman, is that she doesn’t believe animal testing can be stopped overnight. Kleinstreuer could not be reached for comment, but shortly after the Loomer show, she posted a response on Facebook: “My statement that NIH cannot phase out animal testing overnight is simply an unfortunate truth based on a complex landscape of legal, scientific, and regulatory requirements.”
On a rainy day in March, I met Goodman at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the Annapolis Mall, where abandoned or abused pets from the area are up for adoption. Goodman, who is bald and has tattoos, wore a dark blue Ralph Lauren sweater with the teddy bear mascot on it. He came to veganism through the punk scene, he told me. He has spent time in San Diego, where I grew up, and in his vibe, he resembled a grown-up version of the animal advocates I saw around at vegan restaurants in the early 2000s. He combines a combative anti-authoritarian streak with a sincere morality, plus hand tattoos. At the mall, we walked past caged guinea pigs making their meditative squeals. An employee was cleaning out the rabbit cages. The rabbits stood up on two legs, scrunching their noses at us.
In college at the University of Connecticut, where Goodman studied sociology, he and his wife helped shut down a monkey research lab on campus that used inhumane practices. (“Monkeys were being dragged so violently by their necks that their eyes bled,” he said.) After graduate school, he realized that his heart was in advocacy. At PETA, however, he felt that he was “playing a game of whack-a-mole.” Months of work would go into shutting down a single lab and liberating a few animals.
Eventually he met Anthony Bellotti, a Republican consultant, who founded White Coat Waste in 2011. Bellotti’s speciality is defunding; he advocated cutting spending on both the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood. In a 2014 interview, Bellotti said that, while animal rights is a bipartisan issue, WCW focuses on center-right outreach for strategic reasons: “Taxpayer-funded animal experimentation is a big government program. And if someone thinks big government programs are inherently inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful, then they must also question the government’s $12 billion annual animal experimentation budget.”
In 2016, Goodman joined as WCW’s second full-time employee. He said that he and Bellotti were “totally simpatico” about the approach to target funding. He started going to Republican offices. “They’d be like, ‘Do you know that no animal group has ever even approached us for a meeting?’” In 2020, WCW got its big break: It spread the news that federal funding had gone to a lab in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic. The Trump administration promptly cut the grants. In 2021, WCW doubled down on its focus on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was an object of ire on the right for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and exposed what it called “Beagle Gate,” research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on biting sand flies that used beagles as its test subjects. The study, which had led to the death of five beagles, ended early, sparing the lives of 19 dogs. WCW has been partnering with Mace since then. “White Coat Waste has been tremendous,” she said in a recent interview. “They’ve been with us every step of the way.”
Mace may feel genuine concern for animals—she declined to be interviewed—but her support clearly comes with strings attached. In 2024, she introduced a bill to ban transgender women from using bathrooms on federal property, saying that the law was in response to the election of Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride, who is transgender. In response to a comment from another representative, who pointed out that she had used a slur—“tranny”—she repeated the word multiple times. “I don’t really care,” she said. “You want pen*ses in women’s bathrooms, and I’m not going to have it.”
In this context, Mace’s outsize focus on animal experiments related to transgender health begins to make more sense. At the congressional oversight hearing last year, she said, “The Biden-Harris administration was so eager to propagate their radical gender ideology across all facets of American society that they were surgically mutating animal genitals—like, taxpayer money went to that.” Mace questioned Goodman on this topic several times. “I will continue to fight to end all animal testing, including by introducing legislation that prohibits use of federal funds for these cruel animal s*x change experiments,” Mace said.
For Goodman, because of his impatience with the pace of government and science, hitching his wagon to a politician like Nancy Mace was a no-brainer. “Regardless of what you think of them about other things, both Trump administrations have done more than any other in history for animals,” he told me.
That claim applies only to research animals, however. The administration has treated animals in general inconsistently. The USDA has reduced enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, which, among other things, regulates the treatment of animals in research; the agency’s farm animal research department was trimmed to just one remaining staff member. The new dietary guidelines feature a large steak at the top of an inverted pyramid, and Trump has gotten rid of laws that are unfriendly to factory farms, such as regulations on emissions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed increasing the slaughter speed limits at pig and chicken farms, meaning more animals can be killed. Goodman personally cares about factory farming, he said, but in his professional role, he keeps his focus tight on animal testing. In his view, marshaling outrage about costly research that affects animals people like, such as cats and dogs, is a far more effective tactic than alienating meat-eaters.
Mace has indeed been speedy in proposing legislation that combines her fervor to stop transgender research and her opposition to animal testing. In July, she introduced the Transgender Research on Animals Now Stops and Money for Ideological Cruelty Eliminated Act, or the TRANS MICE Act. It would defund any transgender-related animal experiments—cutting, in other words, basic research on transgender health that theoretically could be applicable to other people with hormonal irregularities. Recently, WCW has partnered with anti-abortion groups that are against the use of human fetal tissues in research. Since those tissues are often used in combination with animal models, Goodman said, the groups are “natural allies.” In January, the NIH announced that it would no longer fund studies that use human fetal tissue from elective abortions. I asked Goodman if he worried that politicians might be embracing limitations on animal testing, a popular issue, as a means of bolstering other possibly less popular views, such as distrust of science, or opposition to transgender research or abortion. He said he didn’t care. “I think we’ve saved tens of thousands of animals by talking about transgender animals,” he told me. “For me, that’s worth it.” He was more concerned about how much could be accomplished before Trump leaves office. “Policies are great,” he said. “But they could be reversed on a whim, mostly for political reasons.”
At the mall, Goodman and I paused by a cage of white rats, which were piled in a corner, napping. A small sign revealed that, oddly, the rats had pharmaceutical names: all allergy medications, like Zyrtec or Claritin. The rats’ distant relatives had been used to test those drugs before they were given to humans, I realized. We walked over to look at the cats. A child holding a bag from Lush cosmetics stood next to us. The bag read “End Animal Testing.” Goodman said he had received a $50,000 prize from the cosmetics company. “At the end of the day, I care about being effective,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about alienating people who care about other issues more than this issue. I’m going to do anything I can and work with anybody to do it. And I don’t care what the collateral damage is.”
One of Goodman’s most radical beliefs is that we should end animal testing before we secure replacements for it. Other advocacy groups are not so dismissive of the imperatives of science. The American Anti-Vivisection Society, for instance, formed a sister nonprofit called Alternatives Development & Research Foundation, which funds projects like brain organoids or chip-based systems.
The Trump administration has cut millions in funding for research that it finds unsavory, such as studies on vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, or infectious disease in minority groups. Federal science agencies lost about 20 percent of their staff in 2025. The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year includes cuts of 35 percent to any research and development not related to defense. Last year’s 2026 budget proposal for NIH cuts references the funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as exposed by WCW, as part of its reasoning.
