Trends In Animal Welfare Act Enforcement In The United States

In principle, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS) can take action against alleged Animal Welfare Act violators. This can take the form of enforcement actions, such as settlement agreements, notices of penalty, license suspensions, and confiscations, or official warnings, which notify facilities of violations without imposing penalties. However, as this report reveals, major societal events such as a global pandemic, two changes in presidential administration, and a critical U.S. Supreme Court decision have hindered the agency’s already lax enforcement efforts.

To shed light on the impact of these events, the non-profit Animal Welfare Institute reviewed publicly available records of enforcement actions and official warnings undertaken by USDA-APHIS against alleged Animal Welfare Act violators between January 2020 and August 2025.

The authors gathered data from the agency’s searchable online database, Animal Welfare and Horse Protection Actions. As this database contained a number of errors, such as mislabeled actions, incorrect attachments, and broken links, they supplemented their search with documents from two other sources, the USDA’s Office of Administrative Law Judges Decisions website and WestLaw, an online legal research platform run by Thomson Reuters. Fines and official warnings were then singled out for more in-depth review.

The authors created datasets to coincide with the dates of three major events:

• The U.S. Supreme Court’s SEC v. Jarkesy decision (June 27, 2024), which ruled that parties accused of securities fraud have a right to a jury trial when the Securities and Exchange Commission seeks to impose a fine
• Two changes in presidential administration, namely the Biden administration (beginning January 20, 2021) and the second Trump administration (beginning January 20, 2025)

They divided each year into two periods, comparing the early part of the year (January 20 to June 26) to the late part of the year (June 27 to January 19).

Overall Trends

The analysis identified two main trends: a predominance of official warnings over enforcement actions since 2021, and a sharp decline in fines following the Jarkesy decision in 2024.

Before the presidential administration change in January 2021, relatively few fines and official warnings were issued due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers recovered in the following years, with fines ranging from 8 to 22 and official warnings from 74 to 112 per period. Fines peaked at 38 in early 2024 before dropping sharply to four in late 2024 and zero in early 2025. Meanwhile, official warnings increased to a peak of 123 in the same period.

Key Trends In Fines And Official Warnings

In the 14 months before the Jarkesy decision, at least one fine was issued each month, totaling 63 fines. However, in the 14 months following the decision, only 5 fines were issued, with no fines at all in 11 of those 14 months. This is fewer than were issued over a similar timeframe at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the pandemic, most of USDA-APHIS’s actions have consisted of official warnings. In the year following the Jarkesy decision, official warnings made up 91% of all actions, compared to 66% in the year prior to the decision.

The authors note that even before the pandemic, enforcement actions and official warnings had been decreasing over the first Trump administration. They also note that it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of the pandemic subsiding from the start of the Biden administration, and too early to draw conclusions about the impact of the second Trump administration.

Implications

Although the Jarkesy decision concerned the Securities and Exchange Commission, it created uncertainty around other agencies’ authority to impose fines without jury trials — hence, USDA-APHIS’s post-Jarkesy shift to issuing official warnings almost exclusively. However, the authors argue that these warnings are an ineffective tool for deterring violations.

Research facilities are particularly affected by this trend. Because they hold registrations rather than licenses, they’re not subject to license revocations or criminal penalties, leaving fines as one of the primary tools available to USDA-APHIS. Even so, fines have historically been too low to serve as a meaningful deterrent. Further compounding the issue, research facilities with private accreditation have been subject only to partial rather than full USDA-APHIS inspections since 2019. Thus, animals in these facilities may go unobserved by federal inspectors for up to three years at a time.

The study’s findings are correlational, suggesting an association between these events and USDA-APHIS actions rather than causation. Other factors may also be contributing to the decline in enforcement. Inspector shortages are especially concerning, with the agency having lost more than a third of its inspectors in recent years, including about 15% in the first few months of 2025 alone.

The growing number of regulated facilities and reduced inspection frequency are likely influencing the trends as well. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of licensees and registrants grew from 11,785 to more than 17,500, while the number of inspections only increased from 7,670 to around 9,700 over the same period. This translates into fewer inspections per facility: 1 inspection per 1.5 facilities in 2021 compared to 1 inspection per 1.8 facilities in 2024.

For animal advocates, it’s clear that Animal Welfare Act enforcement appears weaker than ever, with official warnings dominating USDA-APHIS’s response to violations. For those working to protect animals in laboratories, the situation is especially urgent: since the Jarkesy decision, not a single fine has been issued against a research facility — the very facilities for which fines represent one of the last remaining enforcement tools.

Ultimately, this report raises significant concerns about USDA-APHIS’s ability to ensure compliance and protect animals throughout the country.