Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, in their task at the new Department of Government Efficiency - the DOGE - sure as shootin' have their work cut out for them. The task of throttling government spending back to something within shouting distance of sanity is daunting; this makes Heracles' task of cleaning the Augean stables look like something a little kid with a spade and a Tonka truck could handle.
This is such a mammoth task that it's hard to know where they should begin. But, while I could spend days coming up with suggestions as to where the DOGE should start gnawing, one place might be the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Why? Because they are wasting the taxpayers' money studying transgender animals.
The National Institutes of Health, under President Joe Biden, has spent millions of dollars funding experiments where animals are given sex-change procedures and studied for the benefit of the transgender community.
Taxpayers have footed the bill for roughly $10 million in transgender animal experiments in recent years, according to a selection of grants compiled by the White Coat Waste Project and obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner. The federal spending supported research ranging from studying the cardiovascular effect of giving “feminizing hormone therapy” to male rats to providing animals injected with sex hormones, a “popular drug of abuse utilized at raves,” to investigate overdose in “vulnerable female and transgender populations.”
Testosterone is now a popular party drug at raves? Who knew?
Now, take a look at the name of this organization: The National Institutes of Health. What these studies are looking at has nothing to do with the health of the American people and should not be funded by the taxpayers. This is pandering, pure and simple, to a small but vocal minority of people who are either suffering from a mental illness, gender dysphoria, or (worse) have fallen prey to a pernicious social contagion. The Constitution makes no provision for the federal government to be involved in this matter, and Congress should strip any funding away from any such work. If someone wants to undertake this in the private sector, fine - but the taxpayers should not be picking up the tab for this horse squeeze.
Someone, at least, is paying attention:
“Taxpayers don’t want their hard-earned money wasted by the NIH to make monkeys and mice transgender through invasive surgeries and hormone therapies or to give animals overdoses of sex party drugs,” Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of White Coat Waste Project, told the Washington Examiner. “This is low-hanging fruit for DOGE and the incoming Administration that we’re proud to have uncovered and exposed. The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness.”
It's baffling why the taxpayers need to fund things like the effects of sex hormones on wound healing, much less study of the use of sex hormones as a party drug.
This is the kind of thing that the DOGE was made for. Granted they could spend several lifetimes finding and eliminating government waste, but a few hours devoted to the NIH could yield some dividends. It's not as though we have this kind of (taxpayer) money to throw around; bureaucrats and politicians alike seem to have trouble reconciling themselves to the fact that the country is broke. Busted. Constitutionally this spending should rightfully be prohibited; as a matter of policy, it's a waste of money - fiscally, we just simply can't afford it.
If anyone doubts the need to cut this kind of spending - and I don't mean reduce the rate of increase, I mean cut off, as in, eliminate - well, I have 36 trillion reasons for you.
See Related: Biden Admin Folds Like a Cheap Suit on Transgenderism and Girls' Sports
Make Up Your Mind! Scottish Landowner With £5 Million Castle Suing NHS for THIRD Sex Change Surgery
Some politicians, though, are making the right noises:
“The NIH has taken the cheese and fell victim to the DEI trap,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told the Washington Examiner. “While I’ve spent years fighting for more research and expanding treatment options for those with metastatic breast cancer, the leading ‘health’ agency in Washington has been mousing around and spending millions on rodent sex changes. These silly science projects will be DOA in the DOGE era.”
This is a trifecta: Bad spending, bad policy, and bad medicine.
If all goes well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be taking over Health and Human Services in January. This is the parent agency of the National Institutes of Health. With that particular new sheriff in town, hopefully bringing the DOGE and their Viking war axes with him, maybe we can get this nonsense scrubbed from the budget.
NIH did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
You don't say.
