Congress is urgently working on spending bills for the federal government’s 2025 budget, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has included $30 million for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to renovate, expand, and build new infrastructure at its National Primate Research Centers. Although there were already nearly 108,000 primates in U.S. labs in 2023, this support will expand primate breeding efforts and increase the use of primates in invasive research in the U.S., perpetuating a reliance on animal models that are unreliable and not applicable to human disease.

Act TODAY to help prevent funding that will cause countless numbers of primates to suffer!

There’s added concern because, while the NIH asked for ‘only’ $10 million, the Senate Committee decided to allocate three times that amount, presumably bowing to pressure from animal research lobbying groups and ignoring the ethical, scientific, and economic concerns surrounding this flawed science. This move is misguided and irresponsible, especially considering that over 90 percent of new drugs tested on animals (including primates) fail in human clinical trials—a widely acknowledged statistic in the regulatory and biomedical research communities. Further, primates have rich emotional and social lives, and they suffer greatly when confined and used in laboratory experiments.

Congress is supposed to work on behalf of the public, not special interest groups with a narrow-minded agenda that perpetuates animal suffering and a flawed approach to science. Please contact your legislators and urge them to exclude funding from the 2025 federal budget that would increase primate breeding and research!