RFK Jr. Wants the U.S. To Be the First Country to End Animal Testing

16 Jul 2026, 13:17 by Jerome London · Thought Catalog

JOHN WESSELS / AFP via Getty Images

Updated 4 minutes ago, July 16, 2026

The push is winning something almost nothing else in Washington does right now: agreement from both parties. New federal offices, canceled grants, and fresh legislation are already moving to replace lab animals with human-tissue models.

A photo related to RFK Jr.’s push to end animal testing in the U.S. Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to make the United States the first country to largely walk away from animal testing, and inside the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, it’s the rare piece drawing praise from Democrats.

On June 15, the NIH launched the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application to advance human-relevant science: 3D tissue models, organoids, organs-on-chips, AI, and advanced cell cultures. The NIH will also stop awarding grants that rely solely on animal testing, and the FDA issued draft guidance on alternatives earlier this year, Roll Call reported.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a roundtable on soil health in the Mike Mansfield Room at the U.S. Capitol on July 15, 2025, alongside Senate MAHA Caucus members. Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images.

Kennedy has said his agency is “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” He’s specifically targeted the roughly 20,000 monkeys imported for U.S. research each year and the seven National Primate Research Centers that house about 100,000 monkeys, and has floated sanctuaries for retired lab animals.

Congress is moving too. Sen. Cory Booker’s FDA Modernization Act 3.0, which would push the FDA to fully carry out a 2022 law that ended the blanket requirement for animal testing before human trials, passed the Senate unanimously in December 2025 and cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May. The House Appropriations Committee told the NIH to enforce alternatives more strongly and restricted certain painful research on dogs and cats.

A chimpanzee — one of dozens abandoned on islands near Marshall City, Liberia, after a U.S.-funded hepatitis research lab shut down — waits to be fed by caretakers on November 18, 2021. Photo by John Wessels / AFP via Getty Images.

Booker, a vegan and longtime animal rights advocate, called the administration’s progress “a win, win, win, win, win across the board.” Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president of PETA, told Roll Call that Kennedy and others came in “with a distrust of a lot of the status quo” and “were ready to make change.”

Some scientists want the brakes tapped. A House report itself called nonhuman primates “indispensable” before therapies reach clinical trials, especially for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Neuroscience researcher Colin Saldanha put it plainly: “We cannot approximate the behavior of an organism with anything in a petri dish or on a computer.”

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