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The VA Spent Millions Experimenting on Dogs and Cats. Congress Made It Stop

A 2024 law ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to end research on dogs, cats, and primates within two years. Here's how it happened, and where it stands now.

By James Okafor, Rescue & Advocacy Writer

May 4, 2026 · 4 min read

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For years, most taxpayers had no idea that the Department of Veterans Affairs was running experiments on dogs and cats. The agency did, and in 2021 it acknowledged to Congress that it had spent close to five million dollars of public money on animal testing at just one of its research facilities. In 2024, Congress finally moved to end the practice, passing legislation that orders the VA to halt its research on dogs, cats, and nonhuman primates.

What the law actually requires

The mandate was folded into the VA’s spending bill for fiscal 2024. Its language is blunt: the department must carry out a plan to eliminate research using dogs, cats, and non-human primates within two years of the law taking effect. It also requires the VA to open its testing facilities to federal agriculture inspectors at the USDA and to report its animal experiments to Congress.

At a House subcommittee hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz championed the change, saying the VA would phase out animal research over the following two years and push the agency toward alternative scientific methods. Advocates called it a landmark, and for good reason: it was described as the first time Congress had ever ordered a federal agency to completely end experimentation on specific animal species.

The campaign behind it

The pressure did not appear out of nowhere. The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group focused on ending taxpayer-funded animal testing, had spent years pushing the issue. In 2021 the organization sued the VA to obtain records and photographs of its testing after learning the agency was experimenting on cats at multiple facilities. The group’s advocates described healthy animals bought from commercial breeders, confined, subjected to painful procedures, and ultimately killed, all on the public’s dime, and argued that the VA had active proposals for animal experiments at dozens of facilities nationwide.

Critics of the research also questioned its scientific value. Some experts argued that studies conducted on a cat’s brain would not reliably translate to the human brain. And notably, some veterans’ organizations, including the charity AMVETS, spoke out against the experiments, telling Congress that decades of canine research had consumed money while failing to deliver meaningful breakthroughs for wounded and disabled veterans.

For its part, the VA had long defended the work as sometimes necessary, saying animal models were part of developing the treatments and cures the public expects.

What’s new: the wind-down is essentially done

Since the 2024 order, the VA has followed through. The agency reported that it had not experimented on any dogs or cats since early 2022, well before the deadline, and it has steadily closed out the rest of its animal research. In June 2025 the VA formally ended its long-running primate research, wrapping up decades of spinal-cord studies that used monkeys. Taken together, those steps make the VA the first federal agency to completely eliminate testing on dogs and cats, a milestone animal-welfare advocates had spent years fighting for.

The bigger picture is more mixed. Animal research continues across other parts of the federal government and the private sector, and groups like the White Coat Waste Project point out there is still plenty of work left. But the VA’s turnaround, from admitting millions in spending to shutting the programs down, shows how quickly a practice that operated in the shadows can be dismantled once it is dragged into the light.

If you want to get involved, advocacy organizations working on this issue maintain tools for contacting Congress about other federally funded animal-testing programs, and they rely on public support to keep the pressure on.