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Notes -
I know this is only a side note to your main point, but could you explain why?
We're getting better about allowing terminally-ill patients access to experimental treatments, but even in a libertarian utopia there's always going to be a lot of cases where you'd like to learn faster via experiment but where you have a tough time getting volunteers - e.g. with cancers these days there's typically a non-experimental treatment that's not ideal but that's good enough to not leave people desperate for a still-in-testing alternative. Plus, with any research of medical conditions which are linked to aging there's always going to be some benefit to being able to do studies with a population that ages five times as fast.
On the other hand, I could see an argument that dogs specifically are pointless here - start research in mice where you get even faster aging and less ethical concern over their deaths, finish (the animal testing phase of) research in monkeys or apes when you need closer relatives to humans, and then maybe you want to just skip right over dogs.
I only got the brief description that it was one of Biden's "moonshot" research programs. I'm guessing it just was unlikely to have payoff for learning about human cancers. Instead it was likely to have payoff for treating dog cancers, but she thought that was a bad use of taxpayer money.
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