Congress Probes EPA’s Cruel Animal Testing Program

Six members of Congress—three Republicans and three Democrats—delivered a demand letter this week to the government organization Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding its animal-testing practices. Last year, taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project exposed cruel tests conducted at the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NEERL) which prompted Congress to probe the agency’s practices. “Recently published experiments by EPA’s NHEERL show that lab animals were fed lard and coconut oil, then forced to breathe diesel exhaust, ozone, and smog, electrocuted, and ultimately killed,” the letter stated. “These tests likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year, and their relevance to humans, as EPA has often acknowledged, is dubious at best.” Congress demanded that the EPA provide specific statistics about how many animals it uses in these tests, how much the tests have cost taxpayers since 2015, which human-relevant alternatives the EPA is exploring, and whether a searchable database will be available to promote transparency.