Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s making animal welfare a component of his Make America Healthy Again mission.
The health secretary has asked his agencies to refine high-tech methods of testing chemicals and drugs that don’t involve killing animals. He thinks phasing out animal testing and using the new methods will help figure out what’s causing chronic disease. It’s also got an ancillary benefit for Republicans: Animal-rights advocates like what they’re hearing.
That’s another opportunity for President Donald Trump to co-opt a traditionally left-leaning constituency.
“No one likes to see suffering,” Emily Trunnell, director of science advancement and outreach at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, told POLITICO. “The animal welfare benefits are very obvious to most people.”
Last week, the National Institutes of Health announced it would spend $87 million on a new center researching alternatives to animal testing and permit agency-supported researchers to use grant funding to find homes for retired lab animals.
Kennedy signed off because he thinks the new methods will enable scientists to more quickly and inexpensively draw conclusions about how chemicals and drugs work. He expects that’ll confirm his belief that chemicals in the environment and in food are making Americans sick and also speed cures for chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
“Human-based technologies and nonanimal models are the answer to MAHA,” Nicole Kleinstreuer, the National Institutes of Health official managing the effort for Kennedy, told POLITICO. “They are the tools that are actually going to give us the insights to tackle chronic disease.”
The new center will attempt to develop a standardized alternative to animal testing that relies on tiny, lab-grown 3D tissue models, enlisting help from across the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates pharmaceuticals. Harnessing science and technology to protect animals isn’t an obvious Trump agenda item. But the president has a pattern of taking ideas from the left and repackaging them for his base, to great success, an impulse best illustrated by Trump’s embrace of Kennedy’s health-focused movement.
Some scientists have criticized the plan because they don’t think the new testing methods can replace animals anytime soon and worry that moving too fast could undermine important research on human health.
While new methods could complement or reduce animal testing, so far “they cannot replace animal studies entirely,” said Naomi Charalambakis, who directs science policy and communications at Americans for Medical Progress, an advocacy group that supports responsible animal testing in biomedical research.
Ironically, the plan for the new center has also gotten some blowback from a faction of conservatives, themselves animal-rights advocates, who don’t think the administration is moving fast enough and believe Kennedy’s advisers are deliberately moving slowly to appease scientists.
Laura Loomer, an unofficial adviser to Trump and MAGA influencer, is among them.
She has joined forces with White Coat Waste, a conservative activist group that criticized then-NIH official Anthony Fauci during the pandemic for government experiments on dogs, in pushing to end animal testing immediately, regardless of whether technology exists to replace it.
Despite her misgivings, Loomer praised Trump’s efforts so far and painted ending animal testing as a winning issue for the president.
“Combating taxpayer-funded animal testing is an issue that can completely shatter the Democrats’ stronghold on the issue of animal welfare and animal rights,” Loomer said.
Animal rights’ right turn
Trump has long believed bringing Kennedy and his MAHA enthusiasts into the GOP tent helped him win and will help Republicans in next year’s elections.
Loomer thinks more aggressively wooing animal lovers who oppose testing could help them, too. A Morning Consult poll last year found more than 8 in 10 Americans want to phase out animal testing. Ballot initiatives supporting animal-rights and animal-advocacy groups have shown they can raise big money.
Administration officials recognize their plan is popular. “It’s an issue that crosses all political lines and divides,” Kleinstreuer said. “You have so many people across both sides of the aisle that are very committed to advancing science, advancing biomedical research, and reducing the need or the use of animal models to the greatest extent possible.”
Trump wouldn’t seem like the sort of guy PETA, which is known for its uncompromising advocacy, normally embraces. He’s proposed weakening the Endangered Species Act, which protects animal habitats. He’s limited public access to Department of Agriculture inspection and enforcement data. On a personal level, he eats meat and doesn’t have a dog — one of few presidents not to bring one to the White House.
But looks can be deceiving, said Marty Irby, a Republican political consultant who’s worked on animal-rights issues for years. Trump, Irby pointed out, has signed no fewer than six animal-rights laws, making animal cruelty a felony, creating national standards for horseracing and criminalizing the slaughter of dogs and cats for meat.
“Animal welfare broadly has been part of the MAGA thing since Trump’s first administration,” Irby said.
At his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, Trump has hosted fundraisers for animal welfare groups. Loomer said she picked up a fourth rescue dog there this spring during a Wags to Riches Gala fundraiser.
While his son, Donald Trump Jr., once traveled to Mongolia and killed a rare sheep, many in the president’s inner circle are animal lovers, including other members of the first family, like Lara Trump, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who brought rescue dogs to Cabinet meetings when she was Florida’s attorney general.
Trump’s commissioner of food and drugs, Marty Makary, met with PETA representatives in July and the group sent NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya flowers this spring after he announced that the health research agency would prioritize human-based research technologies to reduce the use of animals in experiments.
Trunnell said PETA sees the end of a 45-year battle to end animal testing in sight: “All other previous NIH directors have been frustratingly and very backwardly beholden to animal experimenters, seemingly wanting to protect them at all costs. And as soon as Jay Bhattacharya came in he started making things happen in a better direction.”
Like Trump, Kennedy doesn’t fit the traditional animal-rights mold. His cousin, Caroline, criticized him during the 2024 campaign for blending up mice and baby chickens when he was younger to feed his hawks. But Kennedy does have a fascination with wildlife.
In addition to dabbling in falconry, he kept an emu as a pet and once brought a whale head home. As an environmental lawyer, he took on pig farmers, once telling an Iowa rally that “large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.”
Most recently, Kennedy and former TV doctor Mehmet Oz, who oversees the nation’s largest health insurance programs, publicly opposed Canada’s plans to kill nearly 400 ostriches as a bird flu precaution. Canada’s Supreme Court is deciding whether to take up the birds’ case, while Oz offered to rehome them at his Florida ranch.
The politics of animal welfare
The incorporation of Kennedy’s MAHA movement into Trump’s fold shows how the president has repeatedly co-opted once-Democratic constituencies to fuel his political rise, starting with working-class, Rust Belt voters in 2016.
While animal welfare has traditionally enjoyed stronger support in urban and suburban areas than rural ones, more Republicans are joining the movement, said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, which advocates against animal cruelty.
Pacelle points to Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s outspoken opposition to testing on dogs and a letter House Republicans sent Bhattacharya this summer demanding that the NIH director end testing on dogs and cats. “Any cause that is very successful politically is a nonpartisan one, right?” he said.
But while older advocacy groups like PETA are wooing Kennedy’s aides, a newer breed of right-wing animal lovers fears Bhattacharya and Kleinstreuer are deliberately slow-walking the shift away from animal testing in deference to scientists who want to continue killing animals.
When Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste, joined Loomer as a guest on her podcast “Loomer Unleashed” this summer, they pointed to an NPR interview in which Kleinstreuer said animal studies were often scientifically justified and that the agency didn’t plan to phase them out overnight.
“What’s her name?” Loomer asked Goodman. “We want to put her on blast.”
After the show, Kleinstreuer received death threats, she said.
In September, Loomer dispatched a colleague to confront Bhattacharya outside of the National Conservatism Conference.
While Goodman said his group categorically opposes threats and violence, he believes the aggressive tactics are effective.
Neither Kennedy nor Trump need to worry about the concerns of the scientific establishment, he said, and neither should their advisers: “The only reason you’re not doing the right thing here is because you’re concerned with upsetting a constituency that President Trump really does not care about satisfying, which is Big Science.”
