GOP targets transgender animal testing in defund demand to NIH
FIRST ON FOX: A group of Republican lawmakers are pushing to block federal funding for transgender experiments on animals in the fiscal year 2027 spending bill.
A letter spearheaded by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and backed by GOP Conference Chair Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and more than a dozen other lawmakers asks appropriators to include language in the fiscal year 2027 spending bill banning federal funding for research on animals studying the effects of "drugs, surgery, or other interventions" intended to alter the human body.
"Tax dollars shouldn’t be funding the Biden Administration's sickening transgender animal tests," Gosar said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "That’s why I’ve been working with White Coat Waste to stop the NIH and other federal agencies from wasting money on this woke pseudoscience ever again."
Just days ago, Just the News reported that the NIH awarded another $584,117 to the University of California, San Diego for fiscal year 2026 to continue a mouse study examining the effects of cross-sex hormone treatments.
The lawmakers noted in their letter that language explicitly banning transgender experiments on animals was also included in the 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Educationv appropriations bill.
The letter comes in response to investigations led by medical watchdog White Coat Waste and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which discovered that under the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, issued millions of dollars in grants for experiments to create transgender mice, rats and monkeys. The purpose of these experiments was to "mimic transgender human children and adults."
President Donald Trump heavily criticized NIH's spending on these experiments during his 2025 State of the Union address and announced $8 million in NIH grants for transgender experimentation on animals would be cut.
In June 2025, a federal judge ordered that funding for hundreds of NIH studies, including trans mice research, be restored. However, that ruling applied only to that fiscal year’s budget.
"Even though it didn’t have to, the NIH just doled out another half-million in taxpayer cash for a Biden-era experiment that crudely creates ‘female mice to model transgender men’ by cutting out their ovaries and pumping them with testosterone," White Coat Waste Project Senior Vice President Justin Goodman told Fox News Digital. "Records obtained by White Coat Waste show this project will subject nearly 10,000 mice to horrific taxpayer-funded abuse — invasive surgeries and hormone injections meant to mimic transgender treatments, drilling into their skulls, injecting toxins into their brains, and ultimately decapitating them."
"White Coat Waste’s exposé of the NIH’s renewed funding to create ‘female mice to model transgender men’ proves that Rep. Gosar’s effort is vital to ensure taxpayers aren’t forced to bankroll these barbaric animal tests," Goodman said in a statement. "The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!"
A spokesperson for NIH shared in a statement that the government agency continues to invest in new approach methodologies which serve as an alternative to traditional animal testing.
"NIH recently announced a $150 million investment to expand human-based methods that better reflect human biology," the spokesperson said. "This funding supports organoids, computational models, and other tools to improve how diseases and treatments are studied. The investment is part of a broader shift toward more predictive, human-relevant science."