No, HHS Didn’t Spend $8 Million ‘Making Mice Transgender’
During the first address to Congress of his second term this week, President Donald Trump bragged about the accomplishments he achieved during his first weeks back in office.
“It was exactly what you’d expect,” wrote Reason‘s Liz Wolfe. “Trump emphasized border security and law enforcement, the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency…and the importance of ending the war in Ukraine.”
But while calling out some of the newly uncovered waste and fraud, specifically at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump made an inaccurate claim that his White House has continued doubling down on.
“Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified,” Trump bragged. “$8 million for making mice transgender—this is real.”
Indeed, spending $8 million to make mice transgender would be an appalling waste of tax money, if it were real. Thankfully, it isn’t.
At the time of the speech, some online commenters noted that the program was likely not transgender but transgenic—”an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means,” according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School, said on Instagram that it’s actually not either of those. “You can take a male mouse and you can inject it with hormones to make it more femin
Article from Reason.com
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