Sponsors (28)
Introduced February 6, 2025 by Troy E. Nehls · Last progress February 6, 2025
The bill improves transparency and tightens U.S. oversight to ensure NIH-funded animal research meets American welfare and biosecurity standards, but it risks disrupting international collaborations, raising compliance costs, and shifting research expenses onto U.S. institutions and taxpayers.
Researchers, hospitals, and taxpayers: Clarifies U.S. jurisdiction and oversight for NIH-funded animal studies abroad, aligning funding with U.S. animal-welfare and biosecurity standards and prompting stronger compliance from foreign partners.
U.S. researchers and labs: Preserves access to NIH funding for animal research conducted in the United States, supporting domestic scientific work that complies with U.S. rules.
Taxpayers: Increases transparency about federal spending by reporting that roughly $2.2 billion was spent on animal-involved research abroad, improving public visibility into how research dollars are used.
U.S. researchers collaborating with foreign labs: Risk losing NIH funding for projects where animal work is performed abroad, disrupting partnerships and interrupting data collection.
Programs relying on specialized non-U.S. animal facilities or unique species: May be halted or forced to replicate work domestically, causing delays and materially higher costs to continue research.
Researchers, NIH, and contractors: New compliance requirements, funding restrictions, and administrative changes increase administrative burdens, costs, and create uncertainty for grant applicants and program managers.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Prohibits NIH from funding any research that uses live animals unless the work is conducted within the United States (including territories).
Bars the National Institutes of Health from awarding grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, or technical assistance for any research activity or program that uses live animals unless the work is performed in the United States (the States, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories/possessions). The change is implemented by adding a new statutory subsection that creates this geographic restriction on NIH-supported animal-involved research. Also recasts and renumbers existing related provisions in the same statute to account for the new subsection and updates internal cross-references. The bill is motivated by findings about large NIH outlays to foreign organizations for animal research and concerns about inadequate on-site oversight of animal welfare abroad.