In March 2025, the President of the United States stood before Congress and said the government had spent $8 million "making mice transgender." The chamber laughed. The press scrambled. CNN's fact-checker, Deirde McPhillips, published a piece stating that Trump had "falsely claimed" federal money was being used for transgender experiments on mice.
Then the White House released the list. Six NIH grants. $8,290,053. Mice receiving estrogen. Rats receiving testosterone. Female mice being gonadectomized, injected with hormones, and decapitated for tissue analysis. CNN changed "falsely claimed" to "needs context." The correction read: "An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump's claim about federal money being spent for 'making mice transgender.'"
I have done my own research into these grants. I have read the descriptions. I know what the studies were actually investigating. And I am here to tell you that the President was right, that DOGE was right to cancel them, and that the $8.29 million was a clear case of waste, fraud, and abuse, and I am going to walk you through every one of them to prove it.
The White House identified six studies that it called "egregious." Here they are, with what they cost and what they were doing:
Now. I want to be very clear about something. I do not care what these studies were researching. Cancer, asthma, HIV, bone density, gut bacteria, reproductive health — none of this is relevant. What is relevant is that the studies involved giving hormones to mice, and the hormones were cross-sex hormones, and the word "transgender" or "gender-affirming" appeared in the grant titles. That is all you need to know. The content of the research is a distraction from the language of the research, and the language is what matters, because the language is what you can put in a tweet.
On February 6, 2025, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing. The title of the hearing was:
That is a real hearing title. It appeared in the Congressional Record. Elected members of Congress sat in a chamber in the United States Capitol and discussed, under that title, whether mice should receive estrogen. Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste Project testified that the studies involved mice being "surgically mutilated" through various procedures. The procedures he was describing were gonadectomies performed on lab mice as part of hormone research — the same basic methodology that has been used in endocrinology since the 1940s, on millions of mice, across thousands of studies, none of which were previously described as "mutilation" because none of them had the word "transgender" in the grant title.
But the word was there now. And that changed everything.
I am going to do something the defenders of these grants keep doing, which is explain what the research was for, and then I am going to explain why it doesn't matter.
The $3.1 million asthma study was investigating why women are significantly more likely to develop severe asthma than men, and whether estrogen is the mechanism. This matters because asthma kills people and the sex disparity is not understood. The $455,000 HIV study was testing whether hormone therapy affects immune response to HIV vaccines — a question relevant to the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV. The $299,940 breast cancer study was examining whether testosterone increases tumor incidence — a question relevant to anyone on hormone therapy, including the 1.6 million transgender Americans and the millions of cisgender women on hormone replacement for menopause. The $1.2 million UCSD study was researching how testosterone affects reproductive neural pathways, with applications to polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects one in ten women of reproductive age.
All of this is true. All of it is documented. The studies were investigating cancer, HIV, asthma, and reproductive disorders using standard hormone-administration methodology on mice. And none of that matters, because the grant titles said "gender-affirming" and the press release said "transgender experiments on animals" and DOGE posted a tweet that got more engagement than any amount of asthma research ever will.
I want to return to the CNN correction because it is the most satisfying moment in the history of fact-checking. Trump said the government spent $8 million making mice transgender. CNN said this was false. The White House released the grants. CNN changed "false" to "needs context."
And here is what makes this perfect: they were both right. The government did not spend $8 million "making mice transgender." There is no such thing as a transgender mouse. Mice do not have gender identities. The studies administered hormones to mice to model human health outcomes. Trump's characterization was, by any scientific standard, inaccurate. But the government did spend $8 million on grants with "gender-affirming" and "transgender" in the titles, administering cross-sex hormones to rodents, and CNN's initial fact-check failed to acknowledge that the underlying grants existed. So Trump was wrong about what was happening and right that it was happening, and CNN was right about what was happening and wrong that it wasn't happening, and the correction satisfied neither side, and the mice continued to have asthma regardless.
In the summer of 2025, a federal court ruled that the termination of these grants had been "arbitrary and capricious" and ordered NIH to restore funding for the current budget period. The UCSD study received $584,117 for fiscal 2026, on top of $646,301 it had already received for fiscal 2025 — a total of $1,230,418 in new funding after the court order.
Rep. Paul Gosar responded: "Tax dollars shouldn't be funding the Biden administration's sickening transgender animal tests." The White Coat Waste Project's Justin Goodman said "the NIH is openly defying President Trump." GOP lawmakers subsequently pushed to ban "transgender experiments on animals" in the NIH spending bill.
So. The administration cancelled the grants. A judge restored them. The administration is now trying to ban them legislatively. And the research continues — mice are still receiving hormones, scientists are still studying asthma and cancer and HIV, and the argument is no longer about whether the science is sound but about whether the word "transgender" should appear on a federal form. The mice are a sideshow. The word is the war.
And as I noted in my analysis of the screwworm situation, this follows the same DOGE playbook: identify a program that sounds absurd, cut it for the narrative value, and let the consequences sort themselves out. The screwworm program bred irradiated flies and dropped them into Panama. The trans mice grants gave estrogen to rodents to study asthma. Both sounded ridiculous. Both were doing real work. Both were cut because the description was more valuable than the research.
The doctrine, stated plainly:
The United States government spent $8.29 million on six NIH grants that gave hormones to mice. The studies were investigating asthma, breast cancer, HIV vaccine response, bone development, reproductive health, and polycystic ovary syndrome. The grant titles contained the words "transgender" and "gender-affirming." The President called it "making mice transgender" and Congress held a hearing titled "Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies." CNN said Trump was lying, then admitted he wasn't, then said it "needs context." DOGE cancelled seven grants. A federal judge called the cancellations "arbitrary and capricious." NIH refunded them. Congress is now trying to ban them by law. The mice are still being studied. The diseases are still killing people. And the $8.29 million in savings — roughly seventeen cents per affected American — has generated more political value than the research ever could have generated in medical value, because a tweet about transgender mice will always travel further than a paper about estrogen-mediated pulmonary inflammation. The mice were never the point. The mice were never transgender. The word was the point. The word was always the point. Do your own research.