In the chaos of the current political moment, it’s impossible to keep up with all of the destructive actions taken by President Donald Trump. One that has recently come to my attention, courtesy of animal activist Paul Shapiro, is Trump’s revocation of an executive order issued by his predecessor, which directed federal agencies to foster innovation in a number of areas, including agriculture.

Former President Joe Biden originally issued Executive Order 14081, Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy on September 12, 2022. The order supported the development of ‘alternative food sources,’ and, in a press call at the time, a Biden administration official specified this included cultivated meat.

For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. There are few things that could do more to reduce nonhuman suffering. For instance, we kill an estimated one-trillion aquatic and land animals every year for food. If cellular agriculture could replace a mere one percent of that total, we would save about 10 billion sentient creatures annually.

The revolutionary protein offers a number of other potential benefits as well. For example, many people are unaware that animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of climate change. While the technology is still being developed, scientists believe cultivated meat will eventually require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that slaughtered meat does.

Similarly, pandemics like COVID-19 can frequently be traced back to animal agriculture, where sick livestock come into close contact with humans. Since animals are removed from the production process of cultivated meat, widespread adoption of the new protein would significantly reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases making the jump to our species and causing global devastation.

The Trump administration has taken some steps that could help our fellow creatures, whether that was the intention or not. It appears, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency are working to reduce their reliance on nonhuman testing. I suspect the real motivation here is reducing government spending.

Regardless — if America is ever able to free itself from the current, increasingly authoritarian White House — I hope the next president keeps these changes, while rebuilding scientific capacity. As the cliche goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. When it comes to animal testing, the Trump administration is right, in some very limited sense. Vivisection belongs in the past.

That said, the number of animals used in scientific research is extremely small compared to the number of animals used in the food system. Cruelty Free International estimates approximately 200 million nonhumans were used worldwide as test subjects in 2015. Again, various sources place the number of aquatic and land animals killed by humans every year for food at over one trillion.

So any benefit to our fellow creatures offered by the Trump administration’s vivisection policy is overwhelmingly negated by the harm caused by White House opposition to cellular agriculture. To date, this opposition is best exemplified by Trump’s March 14 revocation for the aforementioned executive order. The Republican president is sabotaging scientific progress for animals.

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