- White Coat Waste’s (WCW) latest investigation has uncovered how Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has doled out $3.9 million in new tax funding to extend deadly dog tests at Vanderbilt University until 2031.
- Records obtained by WCW through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that this lab forces dozens of dogs a year to consume a high-fat, high-fructose diet to intentionally cause them to suffer from obesity, diabetes, and acute liver dysfunction.
- The dogs are starved for at least 18 hours before testing, then have catheters and probes shoved into their veins and arteries and drugs pumped into their bodies to disable their pancreases. Experimenters harvest tissues from the dogs while they are still alive before killing them.
- RFK’s NIH renewed pre-existing funding for this dog lab through 2025 and 2026 — and handed it a brand-new grant in February 2026 — even though the NIH’s “animal testing czar” Nicole Kleinstreuer claimed that all agency funding for dog testing “predates” her appointment to senior leadership.
- Taxpayers have already been forced to shell out over $109 million for Vanderbilt’s dog experiments over the past half-century.
- WCW is leading the campaign to hold RFK accountable for wasting over $126 million on dog and cat labs since taking office in early 2025, while he and his team publicly claimed to be “working tirelessly” to end them.
During a budget hearing last month, Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI) referenced White Coat Waste’s (WCW) investigations while grilling Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) continued funding for deadly experiments on dogs, including beagles from the infamous Ridglan Farms.
In response, RFK said defensively: “I need to look into this…We’ve ended most of it…What you’re describing should not be happening.”
He’s right. It shouldn’t be happening. But — as we’ve been documenting for over a year — it is, and we have new receipts.
Documents obtained by WCW reveal how RFK’s NIH has kept a wasteful Vanderbilt University dog lab on life support by doling out $3.9 million in new taxpayer funding, including one grant as recently as February 2026.
Freedom of Information Act records show how NIH-funded white coats force 26 dogs a year onto a high-fat, high-fructose diet that causes the hounds to suffer from obesity, diabetes, and acute liver dysfunction in disturbing blood sugar experiments.
This is part of a project that has proposed using 520 dogs since 2012 alone.
Internal documents obtained through WCW’s federal open records requests confirm that this diet can trigger serious health complications. In previous trials, dogs on this regimen rapidly gained weight and became glucose intolerant within weeks.
The dogs are starved for at least 18 hours before testing even begins — and it only gets worse. This starvation requires an exception to the Animal Welfare Act, and in some cases, they are denied food for up to 23 hours before undergoing a 3–10-hour experiment.
Over the course of this barbaric lab, the animals have catheters and probes shoved into their veins and arteries and drugs pumped into their bodies to disable their pancreases and induce hyperglycemia.
Then, they are sliced open for white coats to harvest liver, muscle, and pancreas tissue samples from them while they are still alive.
In the end, every single dog is killed.
After nearly half a century of the same cruel, costly experiments, even the NIH’s own grant reviewers are criticizing it as “not sufficiently justified or innovative” and irrelevant to humans.
Yet, under RFK’s leadership, NIH grants supporting dog testing tied to this lab have received an additional $3.9 million in taxpayer funding to keep them going.
Pre-existing NIH grants funding these dog tests at Vanderbilt raked in $1,776,785 in June 2025, $677,102 in July 2025, $34,898 in December 2025, and $605,994 in January 2026.
Then, this February, NIH doled out a brand-new five-year grant at a cost of $811,217 to taxpayers that is scheduled to run through at least January 2031.
These NIH grants include direct funding to Vanderbilt’s dog experimenters, as well as funding routed through Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati.
Taxpayers have already been forced to shell out over $109 million for this lab since 1978.
WCW’s new investigation is further proof that NIH Deputy Director and “animal testing czar” Nicole Kleinstreuer lied when she said that all funding for dog labs “predates” her April 2025 appointment to senior leadership, and that she was “working tirelessly” to end animal testing.
Help hold RFK and his NIH accountable for abusing pets and lying to taxpayers!
