Call on Congress to reject a $30 million proposal to fund further monkey experiments

Monkeys used for experiments spend their days in barren cages – except when they are subjected to painful and terrifying procedures. These curious and social animals are force-fed potentially toxic substances, infected with diseases, and restrained in restraint chairs for hours.

The National Institutes of Health has requested $10 million in taxpayer dollars in the 2025 federal budget to support experiments on monkeys. Unfortunately, the Senate Budget Committee approved even more, $30 million, to expand the monkey testing industry in its version of the annual appropriations bill, which includes funding for the NIH. The House version of this bill does not include this funding. We need your help now to ensure this funding is NOT included in the final bill, which is expected to be voted on later this year.

Primates have always been used in the hope of improving human health and safety. But animal testing not only causes tremendous suffering for the animals in the lab, it can also hinder advances in human healthcare because animal testing often cannot give us answers to human ailments. In contrast, non-animal testing methods can more accurately predict how the human body will respond to drugs, treatments and substances because they are based on human biology, cells and tissues rather than animal biology.

Please join us in calling on Congress to stop the planned expansion of monkey testing, which has limited benefits and causes suffering to tens of thousands of monkeys in U.S. laboratories each year.

Dear Member,

As your constituent, I am writing to urge you to reject the $30 million to the National Institutes of Health to expand nonhuman primate research infrastructure in the final fiscal year 2025 appropriations bill for the Department of Labor, Health, and Human Services.

Aside from causing immense suffering, experiments on primates have largely failed to translate into advances for human health. Nearly 90% of drugs tested on animals, including primates, ultimately fail in human trials. These experiments have wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Investments in non-animal methods could produce far better outcomes for human health.

Non-animal methods can more accurately predict how the human body will respond to drugs and treatments because they are based on the biology of the human, its cells and tissues, rather than the biology of the animal. For example, the largest organ chip study to date showed that liver chips could detect the toxicity of nearly seven out of eight drugs that had been shown to be toxic in human patients. Animal testing had previously shown that these drugs were not toxic. Continued investment in these human-specific technologies will help us understand human disease and suffering and replace animal testing – including primate testing – in the future.

There is no reason to invest more money in expensive and outdated experiments on nonhuman primates without seriously considering the consequences of such a massive investment of taxpayer dollars, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars per year are already spent on primate research. Please act quickly to ensure that the $30 million to increase primate experiments is NOT included in the final FY 2025 budget proposal or in future budget proposals.