President Donald Trump made a wild, eye-catching claim about government waste during his address to Congress this week — but it was completely false, Rolling Stone reported on Wednesday.
"The chief executive of the United States told the country that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had uncovered an outrageous expenditure authorized by the previous administration: a whopping $8 million 'for making mice transgender,'" reported Miles Klee.
To begin with, the $8 million figure was likely a complete fabrication, wrote Klee. Tech billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE task force have been compelled to take down numerous claims of savings from their "wall of receipts" after reporters noticed they added extra zeroes, double-counted contracts, and failed to factor in money spent before the contracts were canceled.
But there's an even bigger problem: in all likelihood, the "transgender" mice Trump was referring to were actually transgenic mice genetically altered to allow easy study of potential treatments for cancer, asthma, and HIV.
This kind of mistake has been common in the Trump administration, Klee said.
"In removing certain words from federal agency documents, the administration has repeatedly deleted documents unrelated to its culture war concerns, including a database that helps doctors determine whether to test pregnant women for HIV and sections of the IRS employee handbook that refer to 'inequity' and 'inclusion' as financial terms."
One of the most infamous cases is a list of terms the National Science Foundation is reportedly searching for to "flag" research grants for further scrutiny, including "female," "women," "systemic," "trauma," and "bias," all of which have important uses in science and medicine.
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The White House later tried to produce a fact sheet supporting Trump's claim about "transgender mice" — but none of the taxpayer-funded studies they linked involved any transgender mice, Klee reported.
"As is typical of DOGE, the page tallies up spending in a completely misleading way in order to arrive at an arbitrary number. One line item, for more than $3 million, was research examining how 'sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones' may contribute to asthma, and whether estrogens account for a higher prevalence of the chronic lung disease in women. A different hormone study, priced at $1.2 million, indeed used 'transgenic' — not transgender — mice."
Only one study on the list appeared to involve gender identity at all — and it was looking at whether testosterone therapy in female-to-male transgender patients impacted breast cancer risk. Another study did give mice cross-gender hormones, but not to "make them transgender"; instead, it was to measure how it affected their immune response to HIV.
"It certainly appears that the president’s anti-DEI forces simply flagged a random selection of National Institutes of Health material that included some combination of hormones, mice, gender, and words with the prefix 'trans,' then rolled this all up into the dumbed-down talking point Trump used on Tuesday night," Klee wrote.
Klee concluded: "So you can rest easy knowing that millions of taxpayer dollars was not frittered away on 'woke' experiments to impose new gender identities on lab rodents — all of the spending cited was, of course, in the interest of improving human health. Because that’s what medical researchers do."