This week, the Senate Agriculture Committee is set to debate and mark up the long-overdue Farm Bill — legislation typically associated with crop insurance, nutrition programs, and support for rural communities. But the 2026 Farm Bill also offers Congress a rare opportunity to secure other popular U.S. Department of Agriculture reforms: defunding mad science labs in China and protecting pets from Fauci-style lab abuse.
The Senate’s version of the Farm Bill — and its House companion, passed in April — commendably includes a provision prohibiting the USDA from funding animal experiments conducted in, or in collaboration with, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other countries of concern.
This commonsense safeguard was led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) following White Coat Waste investigations that documented how U.S. taxpayers were forced to subsidize dangerous and cruel animal experiments in unchecked overseas laboratories operated by our foreign adversaries.
In 2024, White Coat Waste uncovered how the Biden USDA was funding a $1 million bird flu gain-of-function collaboration with Chinese animal experimenters tied to the communist party and the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology. The project entailed manipulating highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to determine whether they could jump to mammals — the same kind of reckless animal testing we famously exposed Anthony Fauci for funding at WIV. Fortunately, the Trump USDA canceled the funding early last year based on our findings and pressure from Ernst and Reps. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) and Ben Cline (R-VA).
We also uncovered USDA funding for deadly experiments on foxes at a Kremlin-controlled experimental fur farm in Russia. That’s right: In USDA-funded tests, foxes in Russia were bred to be tame or aggressive, locked in tiny, filthy wire cages, filmed for behavioral observations, and then killed so their brains could be dissected.
Both of these wasteful USDA-funded animal experiments continued even after the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of what happened in Wuhan, as China ramped up its threats to our national security and as Moscow waged war against Ukraine.
Congress is right to ensure that USDA bureaucrats cannot waste taxpayer dollars funding bizarre and dangerous animal experiments in hostile foreign nations.
Senators should also adopt two other commonsense reforms already passed by the House.
First, the House Farm Bill prohibits USDA from funding painful experiments on dogs and cats.
This is unfortunately necessary because our investigations have exposed USDA-funded laboratories performing deadly COVID infection experiments on cats (that also received funding from Fauci) and cruel tests on beagles from controversial breeders such as the disgraced Ridglan Farms.
Second, as the House has already done, the Senate should incorporate Violet’s Law into the Farm Bill. This bipartisan legislation requires federal laboratories to establish policies allowing healthy animals to be retired when experiments end.
Violet’s Law is named after a hound rescued by White Coat Waste from a taxpayer-funded laboratory and adopted into a loving home. Countless other dogs, cats, rabbits, primates, and other regulated animals in federal laboratories are not so fortunate. While we’ve persuaded some federal agencies to enact lab animal retirement policies and rehome survivors, others still senselessly kill healthy animals.
That makes no fiscal or moral sense. As we’ve said for years: Taxpayers bought these animals. Uncle Sam should give them back.
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Unlike some other contentious Farm Bill measures, these are all bipartisan. Violet’s Law has been backed by Republican senators such as Roger Marshall (KS) and Susan Collins (ME) and Democrats Cory Booker (NJ) and Adam Schiff (CA). In the House, these Farm Bill reforms were championed by Reps. Gosar and Langworthy, as well as Reps. Dina Titus (D-NV), Nancy Mace (R-SC), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY).
As senators mark up the 2026 Farm Bill this week, they should trim the pork by cutting wasteful USDA spending on shady foreign animal labs and pet abuse.
Anthony Bellotti is president and founder of the nonprofit government watchdog White Coat Waste.