Pentagon Labs Accused Of Price-Tag Coverup

A swirling tunnel made of dollar bills creating a vortex effect

Pentagon-funded labs are accused of hiding the price tags on bizarre animal experiments—despite a federal law meant to stop exactly that.

Story Snapshot

Sen. Joni Ernst and the White Coat Waste Project filed coordinated complaints in February 2026 alleging COST Act transparency violations in Pentagon-funded animal research.
The COST Act requires exact dollar amounts to be disclosed in public announcements, press releases, and published studies tied to DoD-funded projects.
Four major universities were named, with cited projects totaling tens of millions in taxpayer support, including monkey, mouse, pig, and bat experiments.
The complaints ask the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate and suspend funding to grantees that fail to comply.

Complaints Target “Shady Spending” in Pentagon-Funded Research

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and the White Coat Waste Project said they submitted formal complaints in February 2026 to the Department of Defense Inspector General, alleging that Pentagon-funded animal research labs are violating the COST Act by omitting required funding amounts from public-facing materials. Ernst’s letter to DoD Inspector General Platte Moring presses for answers on why grantees can dodge disclosure rules when taxpayers are footing the bill.

At its core, the dispute is not simply about whether a given experiment is useful; it is whether the public is allowed to know what it costs. Ernst framed the issue as defense dollars being diverted to odd research areas—such as octopus hypnosis, seal sleep calculations, and monkey “mind reading”—while taxpayers are left guessing about total spending because the legally required “price tag” is not consistently provided in announcements and studies.

Sen. Joni Ernst and White Coat Waste Hammer Pentagon-Funded Labs for Hiding Spending on Octopus Hypnosis, Monkey Mind-Reading, and Mouse mRNA Tests in Violation of Federal Law https://t.co/yEfDvgzyUz #gatewaypundit via @gatewaypundit

— Ares Unchained (@AresUnchained) February 12, 2026

What the COST Act Requires—and Why It Matters

The COST Act, authored by Ernst and enacted in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, was designed as a commonsense transparency rule: if the Department of Defense funds a project, the exact award amount should be publicly disclosed in press releases, studies, and announcements. That requirement is meant to let citizens, lawmakers, and watchdogs compare priorities and measure waste—especially inside a department Ernst has noted has never passed an audit.

Fiscal accountability is the real pressure point for many voters who watched the prior era’s overspending and inflation squeeze household budgets. When federal agencies or grant recipients obscure costs, oversight becomes performative: policymakers can debate the ethics or scientific merit of a program without a clear view of the spending scale. The complaints argue that hiding dollar figures undermines Congress’s intent and makes it harder to tell whether DoD research funds are strengthening readiness or drifting into pet projects.

Four Universities Named, With Specific Projects and Funding Amounts

White Coat Waste’s complaint identified four institutions it said were violating COST Act disclosure rules while conducting animal experiments funded by the Pentagon. The projects described include Oregon Health & Science University injecting monkeys with an experimental HIV-like virus after administering a “therapeutic,” with at least $7.3 million in taxpayer support; Emory University pumping synthetic mRNA into mice with roughly $28.7 million; Harvard’s Wyss Institute giving pigs traumatic brain injuries with about $4.4 million; and UC Berkeley implanting neural probes into bats’ brains with nearly $1.5 million.

Those examples—presented as documentation of disclosure failures—also help explain why this story resonates politically: the public hears about unconventional experiments, then learns the costs may be kept vague or missing in the very places the law requires transparency. At minimum, the allegations put research institutions on notice that DoD funding now comes with higher scrutiny not just about compliance paperwork, but about whether communications to the public are truthful and complete.

Inspector General Review Could Set a Compliance Precedent

The complaints ask the DoD Inspector General to investigate and to suspend taxpayer funding to any grantees found in violation of the COST Act. What happens next depends on how the Inspector General’s office responds and how quickly it acts; the provided research does not include a public timeline for findings, nor statements from the accused universities or Pentagon leadership. That gap matters, because enforcement only deters future violations if it is visible and consistent.

Beyond this specific dispute, Ernst has tied the episode to a broader push for Pentagon accountability. She has promoted additional reforms, including the RECEIPTS Act aimed at tightening auditing and tracking of defense spending. For voters who backed President Trump’s return in part to end business-as-usual in Washington, the key question is whether DoD will treat transparency laws as binding—or as suggestions that universities and contractors can ignore when the subject matter is politically inconvenient or embarrassing.