"White Coat Waste Takes Aim at Animal Research — From the Right"

"In the past 12 months, White Coat Waste has focused particular attention on research conducted under the auspices of the Department of Veterans Affairs, shuttering one project in California, triggering internal investigations of a VA lab in Virginia, and helping to get an amendment through the House eliminating funding for VA dog research. (That amendment has not received Senate approval, but Bellotti’s handiwork was enough to provoke a stern response from VA Secretary David Shulkin.) The Food and Drug Administration has also been a Bellotti target, and after more than a year of pressure from White Coat Waste, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb shut down an agency research project on nicotine addiction last month, over concerns about its treatment of squirrel monkey subjects... 

Bellotti explicitly frames White Coat Waste as a taxpayer rights outfit, not an animal rights organization, and he promises never to target private animal research. “It’s about your liberty to be forced to pay for something that you don’t like, don’t want, and don’t need,” Bellotti said.

The approach has pulled in people who might not otherwise show much interest in animal rights issues. Trump advisor Roger Stone, for example, hosted Bellotti on his Infowars show last month. And Pursuit (formerly known as Restore Accountability), a government-spending watchdog group aimed at millennials and founded by Tom Coburn, the former Republican Senator from Oklahoma, partnered with Bellotti on a recent report... 

To be sure, the debate over federal funding for research in general, and about the use of animal models in particular, was roiling long before Bellotti and his allies came onto the scene. Critics of animal research, after all, have long argued that medical researchers rely too heavily on animal models, which often fail to produce results that apply to human beings. And there are robust debates over the current government model of basic research funding. The problem is that Bellotti’s conviction that scientists are burning through billions of dollars on cruel and senseless research is, by almost any fair assessment, a woefully distorted caricature — one that fails to capture both the nuances of these longstanding debates, and the very real ethical challenges that go into making decisions about when animal research is justified."

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