The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Wednesday said several grants for transgender experiments on animals have been canceled, and a pilot program to audit federal agencies with unused credit cards has expanded amid “a lot of shady expenditures happening,” said DOGE leader Elon Musk.
The cost-cutting group said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled seven grants, some of which included $532,000 to “use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment” and another $33,000 to test “feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat.”
DOD TELLS CIVILIAN WORKFORCE TO IGNORE ELON MUSK’S REQUEST TO REPORT PRODUCTIVITY
In a statement, the agency said it remains committed to “advancing biomedical research under NIH’s priorities and promoting radical transparency in alignment with the @POTUS agenda.”
“Our work is driven by accountability to all Americans as we push forward in science and public health,” it wrote on X.
In recent weeks, Republicans have railed against taxpayer funds being used for transgender animal studies.
During a Feb. 6 House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing titled: “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty,” Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) watchdog group said the federal government spent millions on “transgender animal testing.”
“In a lot of these cases, they involve mice, rats, monkeys, who are being surgically mutilated and subjected to hormone therapies to mimic female to male or male to female gender transitions, gender-affirming hormone therapies, and then looking at the biological, psychological and physiological effects of the gender transitions, looking at the effects of taking vaccines after you’ve transitioned these animals from male to female or female to male, looking at the size of their genitals changing after you’ve put them on estrogen or testosterone therapies to transition them,” Goodman said at the hearing.
In addition to the canceled grants, DOGE said a pilot program to audit federal agencies for unused and unneeded credit cards has expanded to 16 more agencies.
After two weeks, 146,000 credit cards were deactivated.
“As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do,” a DOGE post on X states.
Musk said many of the limits on government-issued credit cards are up to $10,000.
“There are still almost twice as many credit/purchasing cards as people in the government, and the limits are $10,000! A lot of shady expenditures happening,” he said.
