The Pentagon has been sued for allegedly failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests pertaining to multi-million-dollar U.S. taxpayer-funded primate experiments at home and abroad.
White Coat Waste (WCW), a bipartisan government watchdog, filed the lawsuit against the Department of Defense to force the release of photos, videos and other records about what they describe as secretive U.S. military primate labs in Thailand and Peru, as well in the United States.
The group, based on its own investigation, claims that hundreds of monkeys are being subjected to wasteful and deadly taxpayer-funded experiments costing millions of dollars.
“From Fort Detrick to Peru to Thailand, our recent investigations have uncovered how millions in military monkey business worldwide is being bankrolled by the Pentagon,” WCW Senior Vice President Justin Goodman told Military.com. “Our new lawsuit covers five different FOIA requests that we submitted for videos and other documents, detailing Pentagon primate testing in U.S. and foreign labs.
“These requests were either completely ignored or never fulfilled in violation of federal law.”
A Pentagon spokesperson told Military.com that it does not publicly comment on pending litigation.
'Troubling' Findings, Lack of Government Response
WCW alleges that the specific military primate labs they’ve investigated are breeding and buying hundreds of monkeys, subjecting them to painful experiments that involve sleep deprivation, surgical mutilation, exposure to bioweapons like anthrax, and infection with Ebola and other deadly diseases.
“I think most people would be surprised to learn that the U.S. government, meaning taxpayers, are the single largest funder of animal testing in the entire world,” Goodman said. “We've already seen the worst-case scenario for animal testing come to life with what happened in Wuhan, where unchecked foreign animal experiments funded with U.S. tax dollars likely caused a pandemic and killed over 1 million Americans."
It's troubling that agencies like the Department of Defense continue to fund animal labs overseas when we've seen how disastrous it can be.
Federal reports show that hundreds of these primates being used in the DOD's experiments are used in painful experiments and completely denied any pain relief, Goodman said.
The lawsuit filed March 26 shows five FOIA requests submitted between June and December 2025 that involved the following sites:
- Walter Reed Army Institute of Research – Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (Thailand)
- U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit South (Peru)
- U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (Fort Detrick)
- U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (Fort Detrick)
- Uniformed Services University (Bethesda, MD)
Two of those requests were completely ignored, he said, meaning they were never acknowledged despite repeated follow-ups. Three others were acknowledged initially when they were submitted but never fulfilled and never led to any follow-up.
One of those requests completely ignored was the Thailand-related lab, while the other was a Fort Detrick site.
Goodman said WCW triangulates information from federal open-source spending databases like USAspending, peer-reviewed papers and DOD databases.
“We were able to put the pieces together to determine that not only is the Pentagon conducting experiments on primates here in the United States, at the Navy, at the Army, at the Air Force, but also [that] they have foreign laboratories that are escaping scrutiny in places like Peru and Thailand,” Goodman said.
Lawsuit Claims Federal Inaction
The lawsuit claims a lack of correspondence on behalf of the federal government.
A FOIA request submitted on June 24, 2025, by WCW to White Coat Waste submitted a FOIA request to the U.S. Army Medical Research & Development Command (USAMRDC) seeking copies “of any active IACUC-approved protocols involving the use of at least one non-human primate, being performed by, or in conjunction with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD) or U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
One day later, USAMRDC supposedly acknowledged the request and assigned it a tracking number. On July 28, the request was “in process.” That was the last correspondence pertaining to that specific request.
A separate request was submitted to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff (OSD/JS) seeking “a copy of any active IACUC-approved protocols involving the use of at least one non-human primate, being performed by, or in conjunction with the Uniformed Services University.”
The same day, OSD/JS acknowledged the request and assigned it a tracking number. Two days later, the agency informed WCW that this request was placed in its complex processing queue along with “approximately 3,895 open requests,” according to the suit. No further response was ever provided.
The lab in Thailand is described as the Pentagon’s largest, established in 1980 and currently housing roughly 550 monkeys in captivity. It is operated by the U.S. Army in collaboration with the Royal Thai Army and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research–Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences.
WCW, citing internal documents, claims that the facility breeds around 30–45 additional rhesus and cynomolgus macaque monkeys each year for use in painful testing.
“These monkeys are abused in experiments involving infectious diseases like malaria, Zika, dengue, typhus, shigella and SHIV,” they said. “They are surgically mutilated, intentionally infected with diseases, forced to ingest drugs, fed to disease-carrying mosquitoes, and subjected to sleep deprivation tests.”
Past Success in Eliminating Experimental Funding
The lawsuit comes months after President Donald Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in December 2025 that includes funding cuts for the DOD’s “painful” dog and cat experiments—the first ever to defund the department’s dog and cat testing.
“Early last year, we exposed how the DOD was funding over $57 million in dog and cat experiments around the labs in the U.S. and overseas,” Goodman said.
In May 2025, Navy Secretary John Phelan completely banned dog and cat testing. He canceled a $10 million contract for, as Goodman described, “constipation experiments on cats where they were having marbles shoved into their rectums and being electric electroshocked.”
Goodman said that WCW has found the Pentagon “to be incredibly responsive” and has taken swift action when such programs have been brought to their attention,” adding, “It hasn't been the same across the entire government.”
That includes “problematic programs” involving purported dog and cat abuse and instituted by the previous Biden administration being renewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, receiving new funding under the current Trump administration “despite promises to phase them out.”
“So, at other agencies, the rhetoric does not match the reality, but we've found that the DOD to be incredibly responsive and proactive in trying to cut wasteful animal tests,” he said.
There’s a disconnect between agency heads taking the issue seriously and FOIA offices not keeping up, Goodman added.
