The federal government spent tens of millions of dollars on gruesome and pointless experiments on animals from dogs to dolphins, according to 2025's "Festivus" report by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., which uses the Seinfeld-invented Dec. 23 holiday to catalog more than $1.6 trillion in what he perceives as wasteful government spending.

Paul especially highlights animal experiments in the report, which credits investigations by the anti-animal testing White Coat Waste Project for bringing several to his attention. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also credited WCW and Paul with exposing the Navy's sodomization of cats in last year's Festivus report.

The National Institutes of Health has spent another $2.9 million giving beagles cocaine since they were featured in Paul's 2022 Festivus report and "has added methamphetamine injections to the mix," WCW said in reviewing its contributions to Paul's report.

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci's experiments on beagle puppies are "still funded by three different Fauci-era NIAID grants which have cost taxpayers over $13.8 million so far," Paul's report says. 

Carried out at the University of Missouri, researchers expose puppies to ticks "by having capsules full of the arachnids glued to their bare skin to infect the dogs with illnesses like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever," and WCW's documentation shows "dozens of the puppies are intentionally denied pain relief so that it does not interact with the infection or experimental vaccines."

NIH, the Department of Defense and National Science Foundation spent $14.6 million on Brown University research to teach monkeys to play a video game resembling the Price Is Right game Plinko, screwing "headposts" into their skulls to keep the monkeys' heads motionless so researchers could track their eye movements, the report says.

The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $1 million to "turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers," denying them water for a day once a week while leaving alcohol available to drink, and letting them drink both water and alcohol the other six days of the week.

DoD spent $2.8 million to create "BLT mice" implanted with bone marrow, liver and thymus tissue from aborted human beings. "The first Trump administration cut funding for fetal tissue research, but unfortunately Biden reinstated it
and allowed taxpayer funds to once again be used for this inhumane and immoral research," the report says.

The Navy spent $77 million on a "Marine Mammal Program," training dolphins and sea lions to detect mines and objects at sea but subjecting them to "sleep deprivation" and making them swallow seawater and wear "headphones with loud noises blasting," the report says.

While the Navy said "modern aquatic drones can do these jobs" and announced plans to phase out the program more than 10 years ago, "Congress stepped in and enacted a spending bill that literally forced the agency to continue wasting taxpayers’ money on this."

Other spending items are related to gain-of-function experiments that supercharge viruses, such as the since-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development awarding the EcoHealth Alliance $54 million to collect bat coronaviruses and transport them to Wuhan, China, a suspected source of COVID-19, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's $1 million collaboration "to soup up bird flu viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s parent organization and a researcher affiliated with WIV."

Among the human research faulted by Paul is "$2.1 million spent for researchers to collect saliva samples and survey partiers at EDM clubs and festivals in New York City about their drug use.

The report includes a "bonus" section previewing next year's Festivus report, which will include $2 million to a San Diego hospital that "facilitates gender transition surgeries for kids and another $2 million given to a town in Alaska with only 67 residents.