Norms Impact
Trump Decried Millions Spent ‘Making Mice Transgender.’ It Was Cancer and Asthma Research
The White House sold a fabricated “transgender mice” scandal to Congress, using a federal webpage to launder misleading numbers and erode the government’s duty of truthful public administration.
Mar 5, 2025
Sources
Summary
President Donald Trump told Congress that DOGE uncovered $8 million spent “for making mice transgender,” and the White House later promoted a government webpage asserting “Biden spent millions on transgender animal experiments.”
The executive branch used a politicized “waste” narrative and a misleading aggregation of biomedical grants while its broader document-scrubbing campaign has removed unrelated federal materials through crude keyword targeting.
The practical consequence is public confusion about federal research spending and further degradation of the government’s capacity to communicate accurate scientific and administrative information.
Reality Check
When the president and the White House use official platforms to push a demonstrably misleading claim about federal spending, we normalize a government that treats truth as optional—and that weakens our rights by making accountability impossible. Based on the described conduct, this reads less like a clear-cut federal crime than an abuse of public office: propaganda dressed as budget oversight, paired with a pattern of indiscriminate document scrubbing that impairs public services. The sharper danger is institutional: once executive messaging openly repackages routine cancer, asthma, fertility, and transgenic-mouse research as culture-war “waste,” every agency becomes a tool for narrative warfare rather than lawful governance.
Detail
<p>During a Tuesday evening address to Congress, President Donald Trump said the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had identified a prior-administration expenditure of $8 million “for making mice transgender.” The White House subsequently amplified the claim by sharing a government webpage stating, “Yes, Biden spent millions on transgender animal experiments,” and listing research expenditures to support the total.</p><p>The spending highlighted includes: more than $3 million for asthma research examining sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms influenced by hormones; a $1.2 million hormone study that used “transgenic” mice; roughly $2.5 million for a fertility study; research on how gender hormones affect the gut microbiome in mice; and a $300,000 analysis of breast-cancer risk for female-to-male transgender individuals taking testosterone. The referenced animal studies involve clinical or genetic research uses of mice; the “transgenic” term appears in at least one cited grant.</p><p>The context includes the administration’s removal of certain words from federal agency documents, which has led to deletion of unrelated materials, including a database used by doctors for HIV testing decisions in pregnancy and parts of an IRS employee handbook using “inequity” and “inclusion” as financial terms.</p>