AWI Report Analyzes Diminished AWA Enforcement

The US Department of Agriculture’s long history of ineffective Animal Welfare Act (AWA) enforcement against noncompliant breeders, dealers, exhibitors, and research facilities appears to have reached a new low. AWI has analyzed extensive enforcement data and, in a recently published report, Trends in Animal Welfare Act Enforcement, presents evidence that a recent US Supreme Court decision may be having a particularly chilling effect on enforcement efforts.

AWI examined documents obtained online from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) Animal Welfare and Horse Protection Actions database, which includes actions taken to encourage compliance with the AWA between January 2020 and August 2025. Such actions can be broadly categorized as (a) fines and other enforcement actions and (b) official warnings—attempts to motivate compliance without resorting to enforcement actions.

In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, decided June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court held that, under the Seventh Amendment to the US Constitution, parties accused of securities fraud are entitled to a jury trial when the SEC seeks to impose a fine. In effect, this decision invalidated the SEC’s internal administrative process (which does not allow for a jury trial) for assessing such fines. The USDA also uses an administrative process to fine AWA violators. Although the Jarkesy decision dealt solely with SEC enforcement of the law governing securities fraud, it appears that in the wake of this decision, the USDA has all but abandoned attempts to fine AWA violators as well.

The number of fines, in fact, has recently fallen below the number issued even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 to mid-2021), when many AWA inspection and enforcement activities were interrupted. The records indicate that in the 14 months immediately prior to Jarkesy, the USDA issued 63 fines for AWA-related violations, but only five in the 14 months afterwards. Meanwhile, the proportion of official warnings relative to all actions dramatically increased: In the year before Jarkesy, official warnings constituted 66 percent of all USDA actions against alleged AWA violators; this jumped to 91 percent in the year following Jarkesy.

None of the five post-Jarkesy fines pertained to activities involving animal research. This situation is especially concerning because fines appear to be the USDA’s primary enforcement mechanism for AWA violations by research facilities (additional tools are available for violations by breeders, dealers, and exhibitors). An unwillingness or inability to assess fines administratively against AWA violators severely weakens protections for animals covered under the law, including approximately 775,000 primates, dogs, cats, and certain other warm-blooded animals used in US laboratories each year (leaving these animals nearly as vulnerable as the tens of millions of rats, mice, birds, and cold-blooded animals who are granted no protections under the AWA).

Indeed, an anonymous USDA manager told Science magazine this summer that, with respect to issuing fines under the AWA, “Jarkesy has hamstrung us the most … . We have an inability to do anything, even when we see bad stuff.” While the long-term repercussions of the Jarkesy decision remain to be seen, this does appear to be the USDA’s current mindset—and is borne out by the data. AWA violators must be held accountable, which at this point may warrant a full-scale transformation of the USDA’s enforcement process.

To read the report, visit awionline.org/awatrends. 

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