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Employees terrified of being laid off. Shrinking resources combined with unprecedented workloads. The loss of a tool critical to enforcing its mission. Such conditions would strain any organization. But for an already overburdened division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) responsible for overseeing the welfare of nearly 800,000 lab animals, they could spell disaster.

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In the past several years, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has lost more than one-third of its inspectors, witnessed a doubling in the number of entities it has to oversee, and added an entirely new class of animal to its purview. Now, actions by President Donald Trump’s administration threaten to reduce APHIS’s workforce even further, and a recent U.S. Supreme Court case has handicapped the agency’s ability to punish those who violate the federal Animal Welfare Act, which mandates the humane treatment of animals housed in everything from labs to zoos.

“It’s the most challenging time I’ve ever seen for animal care,” says Kevin Shea, a former APHIS administrator who spent more than 4 decades at the agency before retiring in January. If APHIS can’t do its job, he says, “animals will suffer.”

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In light of these challenges, Kleiman is concerned APHIS will seek to outsource its responsibilities to third-party organizations. A 2021 Science investigation revealed the agency had begun an apparently clandestine policy of conducting more limited inspections of labs accredited by AAALAC International, a private organization of veterinarians and scientists.

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…Naomi Charalambakis, director of communications and science policy at Americans for Medical Progress, a biomedical research advocacy group, argues that the Rise for Animals analysis exaggerates the appearance of severe infractions at AAALAC-accredited entities by counting less serious violations in the total and by focusing on percentages instead of raw numbers. “Labs also often self-report issues to APHIS that they have already corrected,” she notes, “yet these issues still show up as citations.” Charalambakis acknowledges that AAALAC accreditation is “not a magic guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong,” but she says the analysis “paints a misleading picture of how animal research oversight works in practice.”

Sally Thompson-Iritani, the assistant vice provost responsible for the University of Washington’s animal care program—one of the largest in the United States—says she hasn’t noticed a decrease in the quality of APHIS inspections at her university. “We still get inspected, and they’re still thorough and thoughtful.”

Even if APHIS falters, Thompson-Iritani says universities like hers have long had their own mechanisms to ensure proper animal welfare. Every U.S. institution that receives federal funding for animal research must have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, for example. Still, she says, APHIS provides a valuable service. “I like the idea of holding ourselves accountable and getting outside eyes on things.”

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Published August 19, 2025 By David Grimm, Science