President Trump falsely claimed that Biden spent $8 million on 'making mice transgender,' but the real research was for human health.
Even among the many lies and distortions in President Donald Trump‘s never-ending address to Congress on Tuesday evening, one claim stood out. The chief executive of the United States told the country that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had uncovered an outrageous expenditure authorized by the previous administration: a whopping $8 million “for making mice transgender.”
The number, like so many offered up by oligarch Elon Musk‘s government-gutting pet project, was essentially pulled out of thin air. DOGE has been forced to delete many “receipts” of the supposed billions in wasteful spending it has identified because of absurd errors in its reporting — last month, for instance, it touted the cancelation of an $8 billion contract that was, in fact, worth $8 million.
As for the “transgender” mice, it’s possible that the Trump regime’s sweeping efforts to root out language associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion led them to health studies that involve “transgenic” mice, lab research mice that have been genetically altered to better model human disease response. They have been called a “revolutionary research resource” for medical advancements.
In removing certain words from federal agency documents, the administration has repeatedly deleted documents unrelated to its culture war concerns, including a database that helps doctors determine whether to test pregnant women for HIV and sections of the IRS employee handbook that refer to “inequity” and “inclusion” as financial terms. A clumsy or automated search for any mention of “trans” material in medical records might easily have flagged “transgenic” studies.
Yet the White House doubled down on Trump’s line on Wednesday, sharing a government webpage that declared, in a slightly more nuanced phrasing: “Yes, Biden spent millions on transgender animal experiments.” As is typical of DOGE, the page tallies up spending in a completely misleading way in order to arrive at an arbitrary number. One line item, for more than $3 million, was research examining how “sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones” may contribute to asthma, and whether estrogens account for a higher prevalence of the chronic lung disease in women. A different hormone study, priced at $1.2 million, indeed used “transgenic” — not transgender — mice. About $2.5 million went to a fertility study. Another project looked at how gender hormones affect the gut microbiome of mice. Of the highlighted research that does address transgender health, there’s a $300,000 analysis of breast cancer risk for female-to-male trans individuals taking testosterone. Again, the mice used for clinical purposes did not undergo gender transition.
A single entry, pegged at $455,000, was for HIV researchers looking at the immune response of mice who had been given cross-hormone therapy, which is perhaps the closest the list gets to an example of “making mice transgender.” Clearly, however, that was not the ultimate objective of their work.
It certainly appears that the president’s anti-DEI forces simply flagged a random selection of National Institutes of Health material that included some combination of hormones, mice, gender, and words with the prefix “trans,” then rolled this all up into the dumbed-down talking point Trump used on Tuesday night. Asked if they could substantiate his comment, the White House referred back to the same cobbled-together list of studies. So you can rest easy knowing that millions of taxpayer dollars was not frittered away on “woke” experiments to impose new gender identities on lab rodents — all of the spending cited was, of course, in the interest of improving human health. Because that’s what medical researchers do.
“I could find a cure to the most devastating disease,” Trump said early in his speech Tuesday night, “and [Democrats] sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.” But with all the careless funding cuts at the institutions and facilities that find such cures, there may be no call for an ovation in the first place.
