These days, it’s rare to find bipartisan outrage on any one issue. But beagle torture? Funded by our own National Institutes of Health? At taxpayer expense? On this issue, a bipartisan group of congressional representatives all agree: Anthony Fauci and his subordinates have some serious explaining to do.

A bipartisan group of House legislators is demanding that Fauci respond to allegations that his NIH provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia that was used to torture and kill dozens of beagle puppies in barbaric scientific experiments. In a letter to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, South Carolina Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace and 23 colleagues addressed their “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.”

“Yesterday,” Mace tweeted, “I sent a letter to Dr. Fauci regarding cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on puppies; debarking before drugging and killing them. Thankful to my 23 Democrat and Republican colleagues who signed on. This is disgusting. What say you NIH?”

And, yes, these are your tax dollars at work.

According to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases “spent $1.68 million in taxpayer funds on drug tests involving 44 beagle puppies,” the letter reads. According to the watchdog group, the otherwise healthy beagle puppies were treated with an experimental medication before being introduced to biting flies that were carrying a parasite known to be contagious to humans. After having endured months of abuse — including the slitting of their vocal cords in order to keep them from barking out in pain — the animals were killed. According to a statement issued by the NIAID in response to the group’s charges, “All animals used in NIH-funded research are protected by laws, regulations, and policies to ensure the smallest possible number of subjects and the greatest commitment to their welfare.”

What a strange and grotesque “commitment” to the “welfare” of those poor beagle pups. As it turns out, though, Fauci has been abusing animals for nearly 40 years. This experiment was one of countless tests on animals done over the decades with NIH and NIAID funding. He’s doing so in the name of “science,” though, so be forewarned. As he says, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

What’s interesting is that Fox News’s Ben Domenech first reported on this abject cruelty in early August, but the story didn’t gain traction. Now, though, Fauci finds himself in hot water yet again after having been caught lying to Congress about whether taxpayer dollars were spent on coronavirus gain-of-function research in a Chinese virology lab — a lie that was exposed last week when he was contradicted by an NIH official.

Unlike the risky coronavirus research funding and the global pandemic that it almost certainly caused — a pandemic that has so far killed more than 700,000 Americans and nearly five million people worldwide — it doesn’t appear that Fauci’s fingerprints are on the gruesome and despicable beagle research. And yet it could be that while the Teflon Technocrat has managed to avoid culpability for his well-documented COVID-19 ineptitude and malfeasance, he might ultimately be held accountable for an infinitely less consequential series of experiments on dogs in North Africa in which he doesn’t appear to be directly involved.

Indeed, those on the Left who have sycophantically supported the ruinous impact of Fauci’s COVID-19 leadership and his misguided policies don’t seem nearly as eager to defend his NIH for its inhumane dog research. We Americans love our dogs, after all.

Will the untouchable Anthony Fauci ever be held accountable for these awful beagle experiments, or for, as The Babylon Bee put it, “the experiments he performed on humanity for the past 18 months”? We’re not holding our breath. But it’d be a welcome development and a fitting irony for a man who should’ve been shown the door long ago.

(Updated to include additional information about Anthony Fauci’s history of animal abuse in the interest of science.)