RFK Jr. Office Replaces Official Phone Line With Domino's Number Amid Pressure Over Cat Testing Controversy

A federal health agency run by one of America's most prominent critics of institutional medicine just deflected citizen complaints by redirecting them to a pizza chain's voicemail.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., confirmed on 19 March 2026 that an unnamed staff member had altered an official phone line to greet incoming callers with: 'Thank you for calling Domino's Pizza. Can you please hold? Thank you.'

The stunt, which The Hill first reported, came directly after a flood of calls organised by the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP), an animal welfare advocacy group that had publicly listed two phone numbers routing to Kennedy's office and called on supporters to demand an end to taxpayer-funded cat testing at a National Institutes of Health-funded laboratory at the University of Missouri.

How a Call-In Campaign Against Cat Testing Triggered a Government Prank

The sequence of events began on 14 March 2026, when WCWP, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to 'expose and close the U.S. government's $20 billion animal testing business,' posted on social media urging followers to call HHS and demand the defunding of cat experiments at the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC).

The group had recently published an investigation alleging that a UMC laboratory was conducting experiments on cats with NIH funding, including procedures that involved deliberate spinal cord injuries and, according to WCWP's account, the acquisition of cats from a local animal shelter to serve as blood donors. UMC had publicly acknowledged obtaining shelter cats and purchasing additional cats from a commercial research supplier, Marshall BioResources, in October 2025.

WCWP Senior Vice President Justin Goodman told Politico's Pulse newsletter that when his organisation first distributed the phone numbers, 'a human was answering.' By the following Friday the calls went straight to a standard voicemail, and by Tuesday afternoon the Domino's Pizza greeting had replaced it.

The switchover appeared to track the volume of calls almost precisely, first a live response, then automation, then a joke. Goodman brought the audio to the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship's Wednesday hearing on government spending transparency, a session held during Sunshine Week, the annual period dedicated to public access and open government.

The Animal Testing Dispute Fuelling the Pressure on Kennedy

The call-in campaign did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a sustained, months-long campaign by WCWP targeting NIH-funded animal experiments during Kennedy's tenure, experiments the group alleges continued, or even expanded, despite Kennedy's public pledges.

In December 2024, Kennedy said publicly that he is 'deeply committed to ending animal experimentation' and promised a 'dramatic reduction in animal testing at the NIH.' WCWP's investigators subsequently reviewed federal grant data and concluded that, while NIH may not have approved new dog and cat experiments in fiscal year 2026, it has continued renewing existing grants that fund such laboratories.

In February 2026, WCWP's findings prompted Representative Nancy Mace to send a formal letter to Kennedy calling for HHS to end current and future NIH funding for dog and cat testing.

Mace's letter cited, among other examples, a grant of £634,000 ($826,381) awarded by NIH in January 2026 to a dog breeding and experimentation laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a lab that has received continuous NIH funding since 1986 and has, according to WCWP, already cost taxpayers more than £35 million ($46 million).

At the Senate hearing, Goodman presented what he described as a broader accounting: 'First, White Coat Waste exposed how the NIH doled out over $126 million in new taxpayer money to pharmaceutical company and university dog and cat labs and repeatedly lied about it — all on RFK's watch.'

He also told The Hill that his organisation had identified 'at least $86 million' in Trump administration funding used for dog testing. Those figures are WCWP's own analysis of federal grant data, and HHS has not confirmed or disputed them on the record.

HHS Distances Itself From the Prank — But Questions Remain

The agency's damage control was swift. Spokesperson Andrew Nixon issued a statement, first to Politico and later to The Hill, confirming the voicemail had been changed by a single, unidentified member of staff acting without authorisation. 'The issue has been addressed, and the phone line is now functioning normally,' Nixon said. HHS did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the employee faces disciplinary action, whether they remain employed at the agency, or how an individual staff member was able to alter an official federal phone line.

Goodman was unmoved by the explanation. He told The Hill the incident was not an isolated lapse but evidence of a 'broader pattern of defiance, deception, and dismissiveness from RFK's agencies' towards WCWP's work and towards the members of the public who have been encouraged, including by Kennedy himself, to hold federal health institutions to account.

Senator Ernst's visible reaction at the hearing and the bipartisan dimension it introduces may prove the more lasting political complication for HHS. Ernst, a Republican who chairs the DOGE Senate Caucus, has a documented history of working with WCWP on government spending and animal testing issues. Her discomfort with the Domino's incident, expressed publicly and on camera in a committee setting, gives the story a congressional foothold that a social media campaign alone would not.

The line is back to normal, the statement has been issued, and the staffer remains unnamed — but the question of whether Kennedy's HHS is accountable to the people who most loudly demanded it could prove considerably harder to reset.