Despite claims to “drain the swamp” and cut wasteful government spending, and despite the efforts of Elon Musk and a new Department of Government Efficiency, federal agencies spent billions of dollars on a range of programs, including millions experimenting on animals, a new report reveals.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, again highlighted federal government waste and animal experiments in his annual Festivus Report this year.

Last year’s Festivus report detailed explicit and gruesome experiments on cats, including $10 million on surgery and electric shock to make cats have erections, $2.24 million to inject cats with COVID-19 and watch them suffer to death and $1.5 million to torture female kittens, The Center Square reported.

This year’s report highlights cruel experiments on beagle puppies, monkeys, ferrets and mice, including using aborted fetal tissue.

Despite some believing a National Institutes of Health program advanced by Dr. Anthony Fauci torturing beagle puppies ended, it continued under the Trump administration.

This National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious diseases for years infested beagle puppies (as young as four months old) with hundreds of disease-carrying ticks. The process involves gluing ticks to their bare skin to infect them with illnesses and denying them pain relief, according to documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project. The project is focused on investigating, exposing and ending federal government experiments on dogs.

“The NIH-funded project plans to use 436 beagles” in an ongoing program that hasn’t been terminated, the report states. Fauci testified to Congress that he “personally signed off on” the program, the report states, adding that it’s “still funded by three different Fauci-era NIAID grants which have cost taxpayers over $13.8 million so far.”

“Fauci should be prosecuted, and the puppies should be pardoned,” Paul argues.

Beagle puppies also continue to be tortured and dosed with cocaine, the report adds, citing documents in previous Festivus reports. The National Institute on Drug Abuse initially paid $2 million to experiment on six-month-old beagles, dosing them with cocaine. In 2021, NIH awarded another $1.7 million in taxpayer money to continue the project, bringing total costs to $5.2 million so far, the report states.

The Department of Veterans Affairs also spent more than $1 million to force ferrets to binge drink alcohol before killing them, the report notes.

“Like the NIH and its coke hounds, the VA apparently considers studying alcoholism in weasels to be so vital that they approved $1 million for a project to turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers,” Paul says.

The report includes a graphic of ferret behavior corresponding to a 90-day cycle of subjecting the animals to alcohol. The ferrets are forced “to consume only alcohol for an entire day by withholding their access to water in what the experimenters call ‘forced binge’ days.’” During the rest of the week, they are given alcohol and water. After 90 days, “they finally kill the ferrets,” the report states.

The project is described as a “novel animal model to study the association between alcohol abuse during late adolescence with common conditions observed in combat Veterans.”

Researchers claim the goal “is to ‘pave the way’ for teenage ferrets to be used to test ‘chemical weapons, opioids, extreme stress, [and] TBI [traumatic brain injuries]’ or to conduct studies related to ‘Depression, Stress responses, Addiction, Schizophrenia, Suicide and Sensory processing,’” the report states.

Federal grants from the Department of Defense, NIH and the National Science Foundation also obligated more than $14 million “to perform inhumane research” on monkeys at Brown University, the report notes. Monkeys are forced to play a video game with “‘headposts’ screwed into their skulls to keep their heads still. While they play, researchers track their brain activity and eye movements, according to the report.

NIH says the program “trains graduate students to become leaders in vision research, … give them essential career skills, … familiarizing them with vision disorders and their treatment, so that their future research will factor in public health needs.”

The Department of Defense also funded $2.8 million in grants to implant cells from aborted babies’ bone marrow, liver and thymus tissue in mice, referred to as “BLT mice.”

“What was billed as science for national defense instead exposed cruel and unnecessary research using aborted fetal tissue, a morally repugnant practice I have been fighting for years,” Paul said. “The first Trump administration cut funding for fetal tissue research, but unfortunately Biden reinstated it and allowed taxpayer funds to once again be used for this inhumane and immoral research,” which continued this year.

Since 2019, WCW says it’s uncovered “taxpayer-funded experiments that have implanted scalps, fingers, skin, organs, and other body parts from aborted human fetuses into lab animals.”

The federal agencies have not presented any evidence to prove that any of these animal experiments have benefitted veterans, service members, medical students or others.

(The Center Square)