No, HHS Didn't Spend $8 Million 'Making Mice Transgender'

HHS, like all government programs, has plenty of silly and wasteful line items in its budget; there's no need to just make things up.

During the first address to Congress of his second term this week, President Donald Trump bragged about the accomplishments he achieved during his first weeks back in office.

"It was exactly what you'd expect," wrote Reason's Liz Wolfe. "Trump emphasized border security and law enforcement, the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency…and the importance of ending the war in Ukraine."

But while calling out some of the newly uncovered waste and fraud, specifically at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during President Joe Biden's administration, Trump made an inaccurate claim that his White House has continued doubling down on.

"Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified," Trump bragged. "$8 million for making mice transgender—this is real."

Indeed, spending $8 million to make mice transgender would be an appalling waste of tax money, if it were real. Thankfully, it isn't.

At the time of the speech, some online commenters noted that the program was likely not transgender but transgenic—"an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School, said on Instagram that it's actually not either of those. "You can take a male mouse and you can inject it with hormones to make it more feminine," or vice versa, "and scientists have been doing this for a long time, and it's to find out about the biophysical effects" of hormones.

Indeed, this would be the exact purpose of doing experiments on mice: to study the efficacy and risk factors of substances that humans take for medical use.

A CNN fact check during the speech called Trump's claim "false" and said he had mischaracterized grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The morning after the speech, the White House issued an article, titled "Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments." It lists six bullet points of NIH grants for experiments using estrogen or testosterone on mice, totaling more than $8.2 million in total awards.

"The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check [this claim], but President Trump was right (as usual)," the article gloats—truly an embarrassing sentence for any public relations flack to write, much less on behalf of a U.S. president.

But a quick glance at the list shows Trump's claim is still not accurate: Indeed, the top bullet point lists $455,000 in grants "to test the effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy on HIV vaccine-induced immune responses." That funding went to a team at Duke University "designing an HIV vaccine that maximizes efficacy but minimizes adverse outcomes." They would use the grant money to study "the immunological responsiveness of transgender people, a population at considerably higher risk for HIV and other STIs [sexually transmitted infections]."

Another grant provided $2.5 million to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to study the "reproductive consequences of steroid hormone administration." The largest grant listed was $3.1 million for Trustees of Indiana University to examine the efficacy of estrogen in treating asthma. "Women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men," the project description noted, and even though the cause of that discrepancy remains unclear, "studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli."

Indeed, at most, the listed NIH grants describe studies in which scientists are studying the effects of gender-affirming hormones on mice, and not "making mice transgender."

This is not to say that NIH must be in the business of giving out these grants. Perhaps the recipients' institutions should shoulder a greater burden of the research their faculty and staff are conducting, leaving those millions of dollars in taxpayers' pockets.

And this is also not to suggest HHS' programs have no waste or fraud. In 2023 alone, Medicare and Medicaid issued over $100 billion in "improper payments."

But that's the point: When HHS, just like any government program, already has plenty of silly and wasteful line items ripe for cutting, there's no need to just make up new ones.