Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin will commit the agency to ending testing on mammals by 2035, reviving a key goal of the first Trump administration and reversing a Biden-era walkback.
Mr. Zeldin declared the goal in a speech Thursday afternoon, The Washington Times was the first to report.
“I’m absolutely committed to making sure EPA gets back on track with the historic goal set out during President Trump’s first term in office,” Mr. Zeldin said. “Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA will not delay scientific progress on developing alternatives to animal testing. We will pursue this goal while adhering to the law and the highest quality scientific standards.”
His agency has made some big strides toward that goal over the past year, including an adoption program that provides humane retirements for some animals at the EPA’s lab in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The number of rodents in EPA labs fell from 466 in April to 41 in November.
The EPA said cancer evaluations for two plasticizer chemicals, dibutyl phthalate and di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, have been conducted with alternative methods that don’t require animal testing, sparing 1,600 mice and rats from experimentation.
The EPA uses animals in assessing the toxicity of chemicals.
Agency officials acknowledged that some “minimal amount” of animal testing is required by law but said the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention will scour the law and the federal code to see where it can offer waivers.
The 2035 goal was first set in 2019 by Andrew Wheeler, the EPA’s administrator during the first Trump administration. At the time, the deadline was 16 years away. He had called for reducing mammal-based testing by 30% and eliminating new mammal study requests and funding by 2025.
Mr. Wheeler, at the time, recounted internal resistance at the EPA when he set the deadlines in 2019. He said he had to draft the policy independently.
The Biden EPA ditched the deadlines, saying that they had become a needless point of contention.
Key left-wing groups in the environmental and social justice communities said the testing phaseout would hurt marginalized populations the most.
Researchers who support animal testing say alternatives aren’t available.
Those who support the phaseout say it will take a deadline to spur the kind of innovation needed to develop the alternatives, which are generally known as “new approach methodologies.”
They can include computer simulations or organoids, which are lab-grown cell-based models designed to mimic tissues and organs.
“The scientific community is moving away from animal testing, and huge advances in developing NAMs have been made in recent years and are expected to accelerate,” the agency said. “The Trump EPA will work to be at the forefront of developing and incorporating advances in NAMs into its scientific framework to ensure agency assessments and scientific work uses high quality, gold standard science.”
Mr. Zeldin was a Republican member of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus during his time in the U.S. House and received a Humane Society award for animal protection in 2017.
In sticking with the 2035 goal, Mr. Zeldin is setting an aggressive schedule, particularly given the intervening seven years and the Biden administration’s retreat.
The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog that pushes for an end to taxpayer-funded animal testing, discovered that the EPA had backtracked on promises to retire rabbits at the North Carolina lab. Instead of adopting them out, the agency had them euthanized, saying it had encountered “complexities.”
When White Coat offered to adopt and place the rabbits, the overture was rebuffed.
The EPA then began new research on the bunnies that were supposed to be retired, collecting their sperm for an experiment loosely tied to exploring “the worldwide drop in human semen quality.”
Justin Goodman, senior vice president at White Coat, hailed Mr. Zeldin for renewing the phaseout.
“Reinstating the Trump EPA’s animal testing phase-out deadline and lab animal retirement plan has been a top White Coat Waste priority since Day 1 of the new administration,” he said.
Other groups also cheered the move.
“EPA is back on track,” said Sara Amundson, president of Humane World Action Fund, formerly the Humane Society Legislative Fund. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hailed the EPA as “a leader in advancing reliable and human‑relevant non‑animal testing.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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