How Animal Advocates Are Bracing for Trump’s Return

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to re-enter the White House in January, he and his team have announced nominations for a wide swath of allies. Cabinet appointees include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk will help lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. What will these changes mean for animal advocates?

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Animal Law and Policy Institute, gives her thoughts on what the next four years might bring. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Sentient: What is your impression of how legal advocacy within the animal realm might change under the new administration?

Delcianna Winders: I think we’re definitely going to see big shifts in animal advocacy, primarily because we’re going to be put in a defensive posture. Already we have too few protections for animals, so rather than focusing our efforts on trying to push for more, like we typically do, we’re going to need to divert a lot of resources to just holding steady at where we are.

We can also expect to see enforcement, which already has never been good, drop. We’re going to have to use our resources to come in and supplement inadequate enforcement by the federal government and get help to animals in whatever creative ways we can when the government isn’t doing so.

Sentient: I hadn’t thought about enforcement changing under Trump, but it seems poised to be a big issue with the new Department of Government Efficiency.

Winders: Yes, it seems likely that they will be rolling back on a lot of personnel. Under the first Trump administration, Animal Welfare Act enforcement fell precipitously. It was never robust, but it fell. Now that you know it’s been made very clear that they want to cut staff — they want to cut funding — I think we can expect to see that be even more dramatic with the incoming administration.

Sentient: There was a period of time when he signed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT Act) when animal advocates were very happy with Trump.

Winders: He signed the PACT Act into law, which is a criminal law prohibiting really the most egregious abuses of animals. The law does have a lot of exemptions. It carves out common farming practices and animal experimentation practices and so on. But yes, he did get credit for that, and he did sign that into law.

Sentient: Overall, would you consider Trump’s last presidency as a net positive or net negative for animals?

Winders: On the whole, I would say it was not good for animals. There were some good things. He temporarily halted allowing elephant trophies into the country. There was some funding cut for animal experiments, and the PACT Act was signed into law. He’s uneven, he’s unpredictable, so I think there were some good things, but there was also a lot of damage done. 

Sentient: Consumer protection and nuisance laws have been heavily used recently to push back on large-scale animal production — for example, in the People v. JBS USA Food Co. suit filed in New York. How might the new administration impact those lawsuits? 

Winders: I think consumer protection and nuisance law are two areas that are going to be less impacted by federal law and the federal government and the administration change, because those are principally state laws. Those are sort of core areas of state jurisdiction. I could always be surprised, but I don’t anticipate drama. That said, we’re also seeing changes on the state level, and there have been efforts to, for example, expand Right to Farm laws to make it even harder to sue for nuisance involving concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO). Just because the federal government currently doesn’t pose a threat doesn’t mean that everything is going to be easy.

Sentient: What impact might Trump’s judicial appointments have? 

Winders: It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Trump’s judicial appointments will impact animal law, and the many judicial appointments that are to come. He appointed 226 judges to the federal bench while he was in office, plus three to the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s probably going to have an opportunity to appoint one or two more to the Supreme Court in the next term. 

Those judges are going to be in their positions for a very long time. They’re lifetime appointments, and they’re ultimately the check on the executive branch. Now you’ve got an executive branch that’s going to be run by the same person who put a significant percentage of the judiciary in place. It’s very much a concern, and it’s forcing us to reevaluate our strategies and to look more frankly, at state and local efforts.

Sentient: The Supreme Court is hearing Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, which has the potential to roll back environmental reporting requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). How might that case impact factory farms?

Winders: First, environmental impact statements are not generally done for CAFOs. CAFOs have a lot of carve outs from our laws, including environmental laws, so the laws that all the rest of us have to follow, even other industries, CAFOs generally are exempt from. So they’re exempt from a lot of Clean Water Act requirements, Clean Air Act, and there’s just not really any federal oversight of what’s happening on the ground at CAFOs.

That said, there are still significant implications of this case. It’s focused on ‘whether’. When the federal government is involved in a project — for example, approving a project or funding a project — they just have to look at the four corners of that project’s footprints or if they have to consider upstream and downstream effects. My impression is that the Supreme Court is likely to say you don’t have to consider upstream and downstream effects, even if they’re foreseeable, and that’s really alarming. I think it could have repercussions in a lot of different animal cases. 

As one example, when pig slaughter was deregulated in 2019, the USDA was very clear that the purpose of doing this was to facilitate the slaughter of 11.5 million more pigs each year so that we can increase profits. You would want them to consider the environmental impacts of raising 11.5 million more pigs a year, transporting them to slaughter, and then, of course, the impacts at the slaughterhouse, the massive additional amount of water that’s going to be used, polluted water that’s going to be discharged directly into our waterways. While [the] environmental impacts weren’t considered in that case for other, non-related reasons, it’s an example of what you’d hope they would consider and that won’t be considered, even though they’re very foreseeable and very serious. 

Sentient: How might the case impact wildlife and wildlife advocates? 

Winders: If you’ve got something that is discharging into our waterways, and they’re going to look at the immediate footprint of that discharge, and not a pollutant in there that is actually going to make it five miles downstream and is going to embed in animals’ bodies and work its way up the food chain. That’s not going to be considered. There are all kinds of situations like that where a project’s impacts, particularly in terms of pollution, go far beyond the boundaries of the particular project and impact wildlife. And if those impacts aren’t considered, that’s alarming, and we’re not even going to have access to information that assesses those impacts on wildlife.

Sentient: How might the case impact the ability of advocates to bring lawsuits? 

Winders: For advocates, NEPA is one of the few tools at our disposal. There’s a Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, but they have carve outs, particularly when we’re talking about CAFOs. NEPA is a procedural statute, so it doesn’t require agencies to do anything like take the least environmentally harmful pathway, it just requires them to consider the environmental impacts and, importantly, disclose those to the public. When an agency fails to do that, that can be an important tool for advocates, because you can sort of hit pause on the project and make sure they consider those impacts. When you don’t have other tools available, NEPA is an important pathway for advocates. In the absence of NEPA as a tool in that context —and there are many situations in which there aren’t going to be alternatives — the options are limited. We’re going to need to get more creative.

Sentient: What do you think will happen with Prop 12 (a law banning the sale of some products that result from cruel confinement of animals)? 

Winders: On the one hand, I think the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Prop 12 — upholding California’s right to have a say over the conditions under which the products it’s bringing into its borders are produced, including the animal welfare conditions — creates opportunities for us at the state and local level. We could be looking at other pathways for states to have a say in how animals are raised for products that are brought into the state. 

On the other hand, there are efforts to completely eviscerate Prop 12 and similar laws in about a dozen other states, and much more broadly, to eviscerate state and local authority over agricultural products that are brought into their boundaries. 

The Ending Agricultural Trade and Suppression Act (EATS Act), would basically limit state and local governments’ ability to create pre-harvest standards on agricultural products brought into their districts. That has tremendous implications for animals, and is very blatantly intended to overturn Prop 12 and other confinement bans, but also implicates all sorts of things far beyond animal protection. The EATS Act hasn’t gotten a lot of support in Congress, but it has found its way into some versions of the Farm Bill, and with the Republican control of Congress now, there are very serious concerns about that potentially being enacted. That would have devastating impacts.

Sentient: Conservatives and the incoming government have leaned heavily into the idea of localizing governance and returning more power to the states on everything from women’s health to education. Why do you think that animals are seemingly the exception? 

Winders: I think it comes down to the agricultural lobby and the small handful of multibillion-dollar multinational corporations that control our food system. They have a huge amount of sway over our elected officials because of our campaign finance laws, and so they have managed to get special treatment for many years now under the law. Even when there’s purportedly a priority to let states make decisions, it’s taken away in this context, which is considered some sort of exceptional situation.

Sentient: How do you think that ag-gag laws (laws restricting undercover filming in factory farms and slaughterhouses) will be impacted under the new administration? 

Winders: Ag-gag laws are state laws. I mean, I suppose we could see a federal ag-gag law. I haven’t heard anybody float that. That would be alarming. The way the federal government comes into play in the context of ag-gag laws, at least currently, are when federal judges review challenges to those laws. Those are typically First Amendment challenges, and the First Amendment is a pretty nonpartisan issue. People on both sides of the aisle think that there should be free speech. I’d like to think that even with this radical shift in the judiciary, we wouldn’t be in too different of a situation.

Sentient: Given the intimate ties between agriculture and immigration, how do you think that the sweeping proposed immigration policy could influence advocates on the ground? 

Winders: Our food system would come to a screeching halt if we didn’t have the migrant labor that we have. Products would be much more expensive. Slaughterhouses, for example, rely heavily on migrant labor; a lot of that is undocumented labor. The dairy industry is another example. It’s well documented that milk would cost much, much more if they couldn’t rely on immigrant labor. Frankly, I just don’t think it’s realistic for them to do what they’re saying they’re going to do. I don’t think that they could handle the repercussions of it.

I think that this discourse poses an opportunity for animal advocates to work hand-in-hand with advocates of immigrant labor, worker safety, worker protection organizations. There is a lot of common ground there. These multinational corporations are exploiting these workers in the exact same overarching framework that they’re using to exploit animals and the environment and everything else. Working together is the only way that we’re going to be able to tackle these very well-funded entities.

Sentient: How do you expect your own advocacy to shift under the new administration?

Winders: One thing is that I anticipate more Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation. There was a big assault on transparency under the first Trump administration. In the first two weeks, the USDA took down thousands of records related to Animal Welfare Act enforcement. It had repeatedly recognized it was legally required to post those. They were important records to monitor whether the USDA was doing its job under the Animal Welfare Act and to get help to animals when it wasn’t doing its job. With the records we could at least know what was going on. We rely on that kind of information in all sorts of contexts. 

I think we’re going to need to be very vigilant about the information that the government’s supposed to proactively post online, but we’re also going to need to be filing and probably litigating FOIA suits regarding other information to keep an eye on the government. I also think we’re just going to need to be doing a lot of defensive work against these efforts to gut the administrative state, at least insofar as it’s protecting animals. 

During the first Trump administration, we saw really problematic NEPA and Endangered Species Act regulations put in place. To the point that they were just violating the statutes.  

I think we can expect to see delisting of endangered species. Under the first administration, we definitely saw that, including with gray wolves and grizzly bears. We’re gonna have to litigate over that. 

There were regulations that had been in the works for many years, in some cases more than a decade; for example, the livestock welfare standards under the organics law that the Trump administration just pulled. The Biden administration then came in and finalized that rule and other rules that had been tampered with by the Trump administration. I think we can expect to see a lot of those pulled back and similar efforts pursued. We’re just going to have to fight back against all of that. I think we also still need to be trying to proactively move the needle forward for animals, and I think that’s where the state and local efforts are going to become really important.

Sentient: Do you have anything else you’d like to add? 

Winders: I’ve been trying to think about the positive angles on all of this. And I think one thing we should be thinking about is the very clear priority to cut funding and to cut budgets. The federal government spends billions on exploiting animals directly or facilitating the exploitation by others. We should be pushing very hard for that funding to be cut. For example, the federal government spends more than $20 billion a year on funding animal experiments. We can certainly urge cuts to that funding. It spends more than $30 billion a year propping up agriculture, most of that animal agriculture. That funding could be cut. The Agricultural Research Service arm of the USDA conducts its own experiments on farmed animals specifically intended to increase production. They’re a direct subsidy to the industry, and so that’s something that could be cut. Wildlife Services, another arm of the USDA, whose entire mission is to kill wildlife — well over a million animals every year — is something that we could certainly cut. I think these are opportunities where animal advocates could see eye-to-eye with the federal government.