The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It’s simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it’s waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it’s valid use of government money. So “waste” = “spending I disagree with” again.
True: whitehouse.gov.
This is tangential to the main point so I don’t want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn’t show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It’s simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it’s waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it’s valid use of government money. So “waste” = “spending I disagree with” again.