Watchdog organization White Coat Waste (WCW) released a report detailing the Defense Department’s wasteful spending to conduct experiments on beagles.

The DOD has prohibited the use of dogs, cats, and primates in “trauma training and weapons experiments,” WCW wrote, although a loophole allows the agency to continue experimenting on dogs.

According to federal spending records, the U.S. Army granted $949,108 to experiment on beagles. The project began on August 1, 2023, and runs through July 31, 2024.

The dogs will be “forced to ingest massive doses of an experimental drug for the alleged purpose of winning FDA approval,” the watchdog explained.

Despite the claims that the experiments are underway for FDA approval, the FDA does not require that drugs be tested on dogs.

In an email statement to ABC 7, the agency wrote, “To clarify, the FDA requires that an FDA-approved medical product must be demonstrated to be safe and effective. The FDA does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs.”

“While the FDA is committed to doing all that it can to reduce the reliance on animal-based studies, there are still many areas where animal research is necessary because the current state of science does not support the replacement of all animal studies with non-animal methods,” the statement added.

WCW submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more information.

In 2021, the watchdog revealed that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were spent on toxicity studies for beagle puppies, cordectomies to prevent barking, and other experiments that led to the deaths of dogs.

Last week, Representatives Nancy Mace (R-SC) led a letter sent to Tom Vilsak, Secretary of the USDA, seeking to obtain information relating to experiments on cats.

“We are writing to obtain information about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) ongoing use of taxpayer dollars to fund harmful and unnecessary experiments on kittens and cats,” Mace and other congressional leaders wrote.

The USDA allegedly ended in-house research projects in 2019.

Members were Congress were later “disturbed to learn” that the USDA did not create a “lab animal retirement policy requested by Congress and continues to fund wasteful and cruel research on cats.”

“Documents released to WCW through the Freedom of Information Act and other publically available data show how in another USDA-funded laboratory, cats are locked in small cages, intentionally infected with COVID, and then killed,” they added.