The Claim

Terminated all beagle experiments on the National Institutes of Health campus.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

The Trump administration ended all experiments involving beagles at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The claim is narrowly scoped to the physical NIH campus — intramural research only.

What is being implied but not asserted?

The implied narrative is broader than the literal claim: that the administration ended cruel government-funded experiments on dogs, that this was a decisive action against institutional cruelty, and that it represents a meaningful reform of how the federal government uses animals in research. The claim also implicitly takes credit for what was the culmination of a nine-year campaign by the White Coat Waste Project and bipartisan congressional pressure.

What is conspicuously absent?

The claim says nothing about NIH-funded beagle experiments at external institutions, which continued and in some cases were renewed after the on-campus lab closure. It omits the distinction between intramural (on-campus) and extramural (grant-funded at universities and contractors) research. It says nothing about the broader context of massive NIH budget cuts that were simultaneously disrupting biomedical research across the country. And it omits that the bipartisan groundwork for reducing animal testing — including the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 signed by President Biden in December 2022 — predated this administration by years.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya confirmed on May 4, 2025 that the last intramural beagle laboratory on the NIH campus had been closed. During a Fox & Friends interview, Bhattacharya stated: “We got rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus.” An NIH spokesperson confirmed: “There is no dog research currently being conducted in the NIH Intramural Research Program.” The lab in question was within the Critical Care Medicine Department at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. ¹

The closed lab had conducted septic shock experiments on beagles since at least 1986, killing approximately 2,133 dogs over four decades. The experiments involved pumping pneumonia-causing bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) into beagles’ bloodstreams, performing surgical tracheotomies, and inducing septic shock. Dogs endured up to 96 hours of infection before being euthanized. These experiments were classified under the USDA’s most severe pain categories (D and E), often conducted without adequate pain relief. The last experiment in 2024 used five 14-month-old beagles at a cost of over $15,000 to taxpayers. ²

The closure was the result of a nine-year campaign by the White Coat Waste Project and bipartisan congressional pressure, not a spontaneous administration decision. WCW first exposed the NIH septic shock lab in 2016. A bipartisan coalition in Congress, including Representatives Brian Mast (R-FL), Dina Titus (D-NV), Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Ted Lieu (D-CA), among others, pressured NIH leadership over the experiments. The “BeagleGate” controversy in 2021 brought massive public attention when FOIA documents revealed NIAID-funded experiments on beagles at various institutions. ³

Strong Inferences

The NIH had planned to continue beagle experiments through August 2026. Documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project showed the septic shock research was approved to continue through 2026, which would have required approximately 19 additional beagles. The program was terminated before those experiments could proceed. ⁴

NIH-funded beagle experiments at external institutions continued after the on-campus closure. By July 2025, the White Coat Waste Project documented that NIH had renewed grants funding dog experiments at the University of Missouri-Columbia, including muscular dystrophy research involving over 620 dogs funded at over $23 million since 1999, with a recently renewed five-year, $598,000 extension through 2030. Separate experiments inducing strokes in puppies at the University of Chicago were funded by NIH and NSF. ⁵

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed by President Biden on December 29, 2022, had already removed the federal mandate for animal testing of new drugs. This bipartisan legislation, co-sponsored by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY), passed the Senate unanimously and eliminated the 1938 requirement that all experimental drugs be tested on animals before human clinical trials. It authorized alternative methodologies including cell-based assays, organoids, organs-on-chips, and AI-based approaches. ⁶

The beagle lab closure occurred in the context of massive NIH budget cuts that were simultaneously disrupting biomedical research. The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposal slashed NIH from $48.5 billion to $27 billion — a 44% reduction. By November 2025, approximately $2.3 billion in grants had been frozen or terminated across nearly 2,500 projects. While the beagle lab closure was presented as an animal welfare action, it aligned with the administration’s broader agenda of cutting NIH research spending. The animal welfare framing served to put a sympathetic face on what was also a research-reduction agenda. ⁷

The administration’s ORIVA initiative, while promising in concept, lacked binding timelines or funding commitments for phasing out animal testing. NIH announced the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application on April 29, 2025, to coordinate non-animal research approaches. However, the White Coat Waste Project itself noted the initiative included “no phaseout,” “no deadline,” and “no lab dollar cut” — characterizing it as bureaucratic window dressing. The $87 million Standardized Organoid Modeling Center was announced as an alternative, but its funding was uncertain given the broader NIH budget cuts. ⁸

The “all beagle experiments” formulation was carefully worded to apply only to the NIH campus. Bhattacharya said “on the NIH campus” — not “funded by NIH” or “conducted with federal funds.” This distinction is significant because the NIH Intramural Research Program represents only about 10% of NIH’s total research budget. The vast majority of NIH-funded research, including dog experiments, occurs at universities and private institutions through extramural grants. Ending campus beagle experiments while continuing to fund them elsewhere is a real but narrow action. ⁹

What the Evidence Shows

The core claim is technically accurate on its own narrow terms: the Trump administration did close the last beagle laboratory on the NIH campus in Bethesda, ending intramural septic shock experiments that had killed approximately 2,133 beagles over four decades. NIH confirmed there is no dog research currently being conducted in the NIH Intramural Research Program. This is a real action with real consequences for animal welfare — those specific experiments are over, and the beagles that would have been used through 2026 were spared.

But the claim’s framing obscures more than it reveals. The closure was the culmination of a nine-year campaign by the White Coat Waste Project and bipartisan congressional pressure that long predated this administration. The legislative groundwork was laid by the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed by President Biden in 2022, which removed the federal animal testing mandate. The specific septic shock research had been publicly controversial since at least 2016 and was already operating at a fraction of its historical scale — down from 77 beagles per year to just five in 2024.

More importantly, the claim’s careful “on the NIH campus” scoping disguises the fact that NIH continued to fund dog experiments at external institutions. By July 2025, WCW documented renewed NIH grants for dog experiments at the University of Missouri and elsewhere. The administration also ended a joint NIH-DOD contract funding beagle tests at a Chinese lab, which was a separate and notable action, but the picture of NIH-funded dog research nationwide remained more complex than the claim suggests.

The timing also raises questions about whether the closure was primarily an animal welfare action or a convenient piece of a broader research-cutting agenda. The administration simultaneously proposed cutting NIH’s budget by 44% — from $48.5 billion to $27 billion. Closing a small intramural lab while gutting the agency’s research capacity is less a reform than a reorganization of what was being cut.

The Bottom Line

The claim is literally true: the Trump administration did terminate all beagle experiments on the NIH campus, closing the last intramural lab in May 2025. This ended a specific, decades-long program of septic shock research that had genuinely disturbed the public and animal welfare advocates across the political spectrum. Animal testing reform is one of the rare genuinely bipartisan issues in American politics, and ending these particular experiments was defensible on both ethical and scientific grounds — the lab had produced zero approved treatments in 40 years.

However, the claim takes credit for the culmination of years of bipartisan advocacy while implying a scope of action far broader than what actually occurred. NIH-funded dog experiments continued at external institutions, including with renewed grants under this very administration. And the closure occurred alongside the most severe cuts to biomedical research funding in NIH’s history, raising the question of whether this was animal welfare reform or simply one visible, sympathetic element of a much larger dismantling of federal research infrastructure. The verdict is true but misleading — the action was real, but the implied narrative of comprehensive reform overstates what happened and understates who made it happen.

Footnotes

1. NIH spokesperson confirmation and Bhattacharya Fox & Friends interview, May 4, 2025. ↩

2. White Coat Waste Project investigation; WJLA I-Team report; Community Animal Hospitals compilation. ↩

3. White Coat Waste Project campaign history; bipartisan congressional letters to NIH. ↩

4. WJLA I-Team investigation based on documents obtained by White Coat Waste Project. ↩

5. WCW investigation, July 2025, documenting renewed NIH grants at University of Missouri-Columbia. ↩

6. FDA Modernization Act 2.0, S.5002, 117th Congress, signed December 29, 2022. ↩

7. Nature, Science, STAT News reporting on NIH budget cuts; Trump FY2026 budget proposal. ↩

8. NIH ORIVA press release, April 29, 2025; White Coat Waste Project critique. ↩

9. Bhattacharya statement analysis; NIH intramural vs. extramural research budget structure. ↩