In mid-April 2025, a claim spread online that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration had recommitted to ending animal testing at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — an initiative that many alleged began during Trump's first term but was halted under former President Joe Biden.
The EPA relies on animal testing for assessing the safety of pesticides and other chemical substances that may be toxic to humans and wildlife.
Rumors about the purported renewed policy spread on Facebook and X. "Trump's EPA head Lee Zeldin just reinstated a phaseout of animal testing begun in the first Trump admin, but killed by Biden," conservative commentator Ann Coulter claimed on X. (Coulter and many others tied this claim to a previous rumor Snopes investigated about alleged government tests on beagles that critics used to attack Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical officer.)
Republican lawmakers also spread the EPA claim on X. Meanwhile, Snopes readers searched the website for information about whether Trump was ending animal testing.
The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, reported that the EPA plans to return to a 2035 deadline to end testing on some animals set during Trump's first term but removed under Biden. However, a statement sent to Snopes by the EPA did not confirm the Times' reporting. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the Biden administration planned to end this effort entirely. A spokesperson for the EPA under Biden told reporters in 2024 that phasing out animal testing was the EPA's end goal, but the administration was unsure that the science on alternatives to replace animals in chemical safety tests would be advanced enough by 2035.
Meanwhile, though, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) announced on April 10 that it would phase out an animal-testing requirement for certain drugs.
Deadline set during Trump's first term for mammals, not all animals
In 2019, during Trump's first term as president, then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a directive to phase out testing on some animals. In the memo, Wheeler, a former chemical industry lobbyist, called animal testing "expensive and time-consuming"; he later wrote in a 2023 Fox News op-ed that the EPA's animal testing practices were "cruel and wasteful."
Here's the relevant portion of the directive, found on Page 2:
The EPA will reduce its requests for, and our funding of, mammal studies by 30 percent by 2025 and eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035. Any mammal studies requested or funded by the EPA after 2035 will require Administrator approval on a case-by-case basis.
A mammal is a specific type of vertebrate animal that includes cats, dogs and monkeys. Non-mammals — including crabs, fish, frogs, octopuses, birds and turtles — are not addressed in the directive, meaning that per the dictionary definition of animal, it would not be accurate to say that the Trump administration planned to phase out all animal testing.
However, under the Animal Welfare Act, the only federal law setting standards for treatment of animals in research, the word "animal" applies only to a very specific subset of creatures and excludes cold-blooded ones and farm animals, as well as rats, mice and birds that are specifically bred for research.
Thus, under that definition, the Trump administration's decision to phase out mammal testing could be considered the same as phasing out animal testing, even though birds and other non-mammals not classified as "animals" under the law are often used in research.
It is worth noting animal-welfare advocates make the same ethical arguments about these non-mammals used in testing
There are some indications that the Trump administration intends to return to the 2035 EPA deadline. After Fox News reported that the FDA and the EPA under Trump would phase out animal testing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted Fox News' story on X, as did others in the administration.
However, while the FDA's decision to reduce animal testing could be definitively proven through a public news release on the agency's website, neither the EPA nor its administrator, Lee Zeldin, had announced that the agency will end or reduce animal testing as of this writing.
Fox News' story cited the Washington Times' April 10 reporting, in which EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou told the paper Zeldin was committed to the 2035 deadline (emphasis ours):
Under President Trump's first term, EPA signed a directive to prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and committed to reducing testing on mammals by 30% by 2025 and to eliminate it completely by 2035. The Biden administration halted progress on these efforts by delaying compliance deadlines. Administrator Zeldin is wholly committed to getting the agency back on track to eliminating animal testing.
But when Snopes reached out to Vaseliou via email on April 14 to request confirmation of the Times story, the statement she provided was, word-for-word, the same as the Times' report — except for the final sentence confirming that the agency would return to the 2035 deadline, which was omitted entirely. (She also sent a long list of bills Zeldin sponsored or supported on animal welfare while in Congress.)
As of this writing, Vaseliou has not returned further inquiries as to whether Zeldin plans on reviving the 2035 deadline. Thus, it is not possible to definitively say whether the Trump administration will return to its previous commitment to end mammal testing at the EPA by 2035.
Biden's EPA removed the deadline, citing science
A work plan from the EPA dated June 2020, during Trump's first term, mentions the 2035 deadline (see Page 5). But that deadline disappeared in a December 2021 version of the same document. The news broke publicly after White Coat Waste, a Republican-led animal rights advocacy group, published public records requests in December 2023 appearing to show EPA officials discussing "stripping out" the deadlines from the agency's documents.
According to Science, an academic journal that also publishes science news, the EPA under Biden acknowledged the deadline removal in 2024 and said it was motivated by science; the 2019 decision from the Trump administration divided scientists, some of whom worried that
EPA tells Science that it remains committed to exploring alternatives to animal experiments. Just because the dates are gone, "that commitment has not changed," Frey says, although he doesn't know when — or even whether — his agency will completely transition to nonanimal models. "Fully phasing out animal testing is the goal, and we will always have that goal," he says. "But I don't want to get ahead of our scientists."
White Coat Waste's report led to a bipartisan group of lawmakers signing a letter that called on the agency to reverse its decision.