DOGE Can Save Billions by Slashing Spending for Animal Cruelty

The November elections triggered the transfer of presidential power to Donald Trump, along with the seating of 63 new Members of Congress, further narrowing Republican margins in the House and flipping the Senate chamber to Republican control. In controlling both chambers of Congress and the executive branch, Republicans have a “trifecta,” though with historically close margins that will still require bipartisan support for many policy goals.

Trump takes over from a Biden team indifferent or, in some cases, even hostile to animal welfare concerns, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Merrick Garland working to overturn Prop 12 in California. It is hard to think of a single, original, completed stand-out action for animal welfare spearheaded by the Biden Administration, with the exception of enforcement actions against rogue lab-animal breeder Envigo and big-cat menageries mistreating animals. Neither the President nor any of his key Cabinet officials even spoke publicly about the importance of animal welfare in American society.

Major federal agency actions to benefit animals — the Organic Livestock and Poultry Protection standards and proposed rulemakings to combat soring horses in shows and bear baiting on national preserves — are resets of policies proposed during the Obama era that were not pushed over the finish line or were advanced so late in Obama’s second term that hostile Trump Administration officials in his first administration just swatted them away

It will be up to us to do a better job with President Trump’s appointees and alert them to the overwhelming public support for animal welfare. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum have taken past actions in line with animal welfare values, and they may give us a head start.

If the President honors his pledge to cut wasteful spending — and he’s created a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to be led by Tesla founder Elon Musk to support the commitment — it could yield major gains since so many forms of animal mistreatment are driven by government and the use of taxpayer dollars.

Here are six areas of potential action for the DOGE working in cooperation with federal agencies and Congress.?

1. Stop Biden Plan to Kill Nearly Half a Million Forest Owls

In September 2024, the Biden Administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) made its plan final to kill approximately 450,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the next three decades. The plan was conceived to reduce social competition with a few thousand threatened spotted owls. If the plan is not scuttled, we’ll see government-financed shooters taking aim at owls across 17 national forests and 14 units of the National Park Service, from Olympic National Park to Crater Lake National Park to Redwoods and Yosemite national parks.

Unbelievably, the FWS did not provide any cost estimate for executing the killing project, but based on data from a localized barred owl killing plan in an area in northern California, we estimate the cost to taxpayers at $1.35 billion.

• If the plan is executed, the government will step onto a killing treadmill. Eric Forsman, the premier forest owl biologist in the nation, told the Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop” and recommended that the FWS “let the two species work it out.”
• Native species should not be victimized because they engage in range expansion, a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon characteristic of many species of birds and mammals.
• The cost is immense for a wildlife management program, constituting more than half of the $82 million annual FWS endangered species recovery budget, which exists to protect 1,300 species.

More than 250 national, state, and local organizations, including more than 20 local Audubon societies, oppose the Biden Administration plan to massacre nearly half a million barred owls, long protected by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

SAVINGS: $1.35 billion over 30 years. JURISDICTION: Interior Department.

2. End the Milk Mandate in the National School Lunch Program

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplies non-dairy beverages for children aged 0-5 years, but when those children go into elementary school and beyond, they are denied a non-dairy option by the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). DOGE should work with Congress to eliminate this milk mandate in the NLSP.

• Eliminating the milk mandate would recognize that kids should have some freedom of choice when it comes to nutritious fluid beverages in the NSLP. Perhaps half of the 30 million participating kids are lactose intolerant, with majorities of Black, Asian, Native American, and Latino individuals unable to safely digest cow’s milk.
• The USDA itself estimates that 29% of the milk cartons served through the program are thrown away unopened. Millions of kids just take a sip and toss the rest, with an overall squandering of $400-500 million per year in food waste.
• Cows are sacrificing and suffering only to have their milk yields tossed. Modern dairy cows have been engineered to produce unnaturally large quantities of milk — with a six-fold increase in milk yields per cow since the NSLP was created — leading to health problems such as inflammation of the udders, as well as foot and leg issues caused by the unusually large body mass they must support.

The Fairness in School Cafeterias Act will eliminate the milk mandate and dairy industry monopoly and promote competition.

SAVINGS: $4 billion over 10 years. JURISDICTION: Congress, USDA.

3. Cut Spending on Unreliable, Risky Animal Tests

For decades, animal testing has dominated experimental sciences, including drug discovery. This continues to cause irrecuperable delays in the development of effective medicines, missed opportunities due to misguided regulatory strictures, and exorbitant costs spending ultimately passed onto consumers in the form of higher drug prices. Indeed, predicting the safety and efficacy of drugs using animals has been catastrophic, with a failure rate averaging 92%.

Animal research also requires costly infrastructure and expansive logistical operations fraught with the risk of pathogenic zoonotic transmission (transmission of infectious diseases from animals to humans). The lucrative trade in laboratory animals has driven up criminal activities like the smuggling of endangered primates from Asia.

The Government Accountability Office reported in December 2024 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends approximately $5.5 billion a year to support animal research. This enormous figure is not itemized by species, but since larger laboratory animals (nonhuman primates, beagles, etc.) tend to be more expensive than rodents, those larger animals arguably constitute a large share of the cost.

• Animal tests are not predictive of the human reactions to drugs or disease, which squanders resources while failing to yield cures or treatments. We must rely on human biology to examine and address human disease.
• From 2011-2021, the NIH gave out at least $2.2 billion to foreign organizations in contracts and grants for research involving animals.
• Given the strong possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged either from a live-wildlife market or from U.S. government-funded research on bat coronaviruses in China, it is crucial to ensure more rigorous oversight of research involving animals and to limit awards to only the most meritorious projects.

DOGE can endorse overdue federal policies: (i) The FDA Modernization Act 3.0 (FDAMA 3.0), which updates the outmoded regulatory requirements for developing drugs at the FDA; (ii) Accountability in Foreign Animal Research (AFAR) Act, which would cut off taxpayer funding for research on vertebrate animals in hostile foreign countries; and (iii) The Cease Animal Research Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act, which would prevent the NIH from funding live animal research except inside the U.S.

SAVINGS: $50 billion over 10 years. Jurisdiction: Congress, Health and Human Services.?

4. Replace Wild Horse Roundups with Cost-Effective Fertility Control Programs

For decades, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been depopulating wild horses and burros from the public lands in the West. Last year, Congress handed off $150 million to BLM to remove 20,000 equids a year from our public lands and then feed and house three times that number in government-run holding facilities.

• Fertility control is safer, more humane, and less costly to taxpayers than rounding up and caring for massive numbers of captive equids. The PZP contraceptive vaccine has been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences as the most promising and cost-effective method for managing wild horse populations.
• Rounding up and warehousing horses on government-leased lands costs about $1,600 per year per horse, and there are a staggering 60,000 horses in holding facilities. Those costs approach $96 million a year — or two-thirds of the annual budget for the wild horse and burro program.
• There is a federal law, the Wild and Free-Roaming Horse and Burros Act, specifically passed a half century ago to protect these animals as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” Only 80,000 wild horses and burros roam the West, while more than 4 million cattle and sheep graze on these lands at below-market rates.

SAVINGS: $1 billion over 10 years. JURISDICTION: Interior Department, Congress.

5. End the Federal Subsidy for Killing Wildlife

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) receives an annual appropriation from Congress of about $127 million “to resolve wildlife conflicts between people and wildlife,” in the words of a 2018 Congressional Research Services (CRS) report. Reducing this subsidy for Wildlife Services and concentrating on productive wildlife control activities can save the federal government $1 billion over a decade.

• Wildlife Services amounts to a de facto service subsidy for ranchers to kill wolves, lions, coyotes, and other predator species that play an important role in balancing ecosystems by containing the growth of deer and elk and also the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease.
• Trapping and poisoning programs are particularly indiscriminate, causing death and injury to non-target species, including threatened and endangered species.
• The federal hunters’ use of lead ammunition compounds the indiscriminate killing by allowing lead to percolate up and down the trophic chain.

SAVINGS: $1 billion over 10 years. Jurisdiction: USDA, Congress.

6. End Bird Depopulation Programs that Drive Up Egg and Poultry Prices

Since the onset of the bird flu (H5N1) outbreak three years ago, the USDA has ordered the killing of 135 million poultry on more than 1,400 farms across 50 states. More than 100 million of the culled birds are laying hens and 17 million are turkeys. The agency has chosen to treat H5N1 as a foreign animal disease even though more than 400 species of domesticated and wild animals harbor it. A strategy of mass killing of poultry — by the inhumane use of ventilation shutdown or mass suffocation — is not working and only drives up costs for consumers and burdens taxpayers with massive outlays.

• Mainly because of USDA depopulation of laying hens, consumers have paid more than $15 billion in higher egg prices since the onset of the H5N1 outbreak. Depopulation has not stopped bird flu spread, but it has constricted the supply of eggs and turkeys, causing supermarket prices to soar. A dozen eggs now cost about $2 more than they did before the bird flu outbreak. Vaccination is considered a wiser strategy than mass depopulation, and France, Mexico, and other nations are vaccinating poultry.
• The USDA has also spent more than $2 billion in containment and indemnification costs, including H5N1 outbreaks on at least 919 dairy herds in 16 states After this massive outlay of resources — the costliest animal disease outbreak in American history — we should recognize we cannot kill our way out of the bird flu crisis.
• The USDA has ignored the key transmission threats for further spread of H5N1, especially by cockfighting. Cockfighting birds spread bird flu in Asia, and there’s no reason to think that the same thing isn’t happening here, in a nation with 20 million illicit fighting birds and thousands of backyard gamecock farms. The agency is refusing to be transparent about the “backyard flocks” it has depopulated, and it is not aggressively enforcing our laws to stop cockfighting.

The Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act would enhance federal enforcement of our anti-cockfighting laws and has already attracted more than 760 endorsers, including the United Egg Producers, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the American Gaming Association.

?SAVINGS: Undetermined billions. Jurisdiction: USDA, Congress.

Take Action: You can kickstart our campaign to alert the DOGE to these opportunities to cut federal spending and to stop wasteful and inhumane programs by writing them at [email protected].