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Prohibits NIH from funding any research involving live animals unless the animal work is conducted within the United States or its territories.
The bill increases transparency and strengthens U.S. oversight and ethical alignment for NIH-funded animal research abroad, at the cost of disrupting international collaborations, adding compliance burdens, and potentially shifting higher costs and delays onto U.S. researchers and taxpayers.
Scientists, hospitals, and taxpayers: The bill strengthens U.S. oversight of NIH-funded animal research abroad (clarifies jurisdiction and highlights oversight gaps), which should improve animal welfare, biosafety, and overall research integrity.
Taxpayers: The bill increases transparency by reporting that roughly $2.2 billion was spent on animal-involved research overseas, giving the public and policymakers clearer information about how federal research dollars are used.
U.S. researchers and domestic labs: The measure preserves access to NIH funding for animal research conducted in the United States, supporting labs and investigators who comply with U.S. animal welfare rules.
U.S. researchers, nonprofits, and government contractors: Projects that involve animal work conducted abroad risk losing NIH funding or being curtailed, disrupting collaborations, data collection, and ongoing studies.
Researchers and taxpayers: Programs that rely on specialized foreign animal facilities or unique species may be halted or forced to replicate work domestically, causing delays, higher research costs, and shifting more expense onto U.S. taxpayers.
NIH, institutions, and investigators: New compliance requirements, administrative recategorizations, and changed cross-references could create extra administrative burdens, raise costs, and produce uncertainty for grant applicants.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Official title: To amend the Public Health Service Act to prohibit the National Institutes of Health from awarding any support for an activity or program that uses live animals in research unless the research occurs in the United States, and for other purposes.
Introduced February 6, 2025 by Troy E. Nehls · Last progress February 6, 2025
Prohibits the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from awarding federal support for any research activity that uses live animals unless the work takes place within the United States (including states, DC, and U.S. territories/possessions). It also revises internal statutory cross-references to create a new subsection that codifies that geographic restriction on animal-involved research funded by NIH. The bill is motivated by findings that NIH funding has supported animal research overseas, that NIH lacks routine on-site inspections of foreign institutions, and that this oversight gap has led to animal welfare problems in some NIH-funded foreign research projects.