On Feb. 6, 2025, Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina claimed during a House of Representatives oversight subcommittee meeting that the government had spent $10 million of taxpayer money on transgender animal tests. Mace and other Republican colleagues spread the claim by sharing clips of the hearing on social media.
The story gained significant coverage on conservative media outlets. For example, Fox News and the Daily Mail both published articles related to the rumor, with the latter claiming the government spent "millions turning monkeys and mice transgender." Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit also covered the story.
On March 4, President Donald Trump repeated a similar claim during his joint address to Congress when he said the federal government allocated "$8 million for making mice transgender."
Snopes readers also wrote in asking whether the claim was true. Here's what we found:
White Coat Waste Project
The claim originated from a conservative-led advocacy group called the White Coat Waste Project. According to a 2022 BuzzFeed News report, Anthony Bellotti, a consultant for several Republican campaigns, founded WCW.
The group's goal is to end animal testing and experiments in laboratories across the country by campaigning on a platform of government waste.
In December 2024, WCW published a report claiming the federal government "wasted" more than $10 million "to create transgender mice and monkeys." Then, on Feb. 28, 2025, it claimed it had found that the government had spent "a quarter-billion & counting … on transgender animal experiments." Below, we will refer to these reports as the "first report" and the "second report" because they include slightly different information.
Justin Goodman, WCW's senior vice president of advocacy and public policy, explained via email how the organization arrived at those numbers:
The $10 million figure is from just one of the research projects we did in late 2024 looking at a small sample of taxpayer-funded transgender animal experiments and associated grants.
Our estimate of NIH spending alone (over all fiscal years) for transgender animal experiments is $245 million based on a search for NIH grants and contracts that include the terms "transgender" AND "animal model." This is the floor because many other NIH grants being used to fund transgender animal testing but don't mention any relevant terms in their abstracts or keywords.
Goodman added that $26 million of that total was in active grants, meaning they were still paying out money, and that more than 24 active National Institutes of Health grants that "are currently or have recently funded transgender animal experiments" had allocated more than $64 million in total.
Because the money is disbursed from the federal government, it is public information. USASpending.gov contains information about all grants from the federal government and the NIH's RePORTER database focuses specifically on biological research.
WCW's funding numbers are misleading
Searching the NIH RePORTER database using the terms Goodman described revealed that 15 grants, totaling roughly $25 million, were "active" as of this writing. It is unclear why this is $1 million less than Goodman's estimates, but the discrepancy could be due to a grant the WCW calculated at the time no longer being active. A similar search over all available years (from 2007 to 2025) revealed a total of 72 projects totaling roughly $245 million — the same figure Goodman quoted.
However, this number is a significant overestimate of the amount of money being spent on "transgender mice." For example, grants totaling more than $40 million issued in 2021 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle for HIV vaccine clinical trials included a line about expanding "the enrollment of persons of color and transgender persons into HVTN trials." Because vaccines are almost always tested on animals before being given to humans, the grants also included the "animal model" tag.
The HIV vaccine clinical trial grants issued between 2021 and 2025 to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center made up $221 million of the $245 million in grants across all fiscal years.
The first WCW report claiming $10 million was spent to "create transgender mice and monkeys" included screenshots of five grants from the NIH RePORTER database. Some of those grants were paid across multiple years, meaning 13 payments were listed in total. Those 13 payments totaled only about $5.4 million (although the first WCW report does not say whether these were the only grants they looked at to reach the $10 million figure) and none of the research descriptions noted that monkeys were involved. (One grant did mention "large animals," but its project terms listed "rodent" and not any sort of monkey or ape.)
Snopes contacted the principal investigators of those five grants to learn more about their research. Three of the five declined to comment.
What were the studies about?
All five grants named in the first report involved taking animal subjects and injecting them with testosterone or estrogen in order to approximate gender-affirming hormone therapies given to some transgender people (according to one research article, hormone therapies are given to cisgender people more frequently than they are given to transgender people). This appeared to be what "creating transgender mice" referred to.
After injections, research was conducted on the mice: One grant predicted that the structure of mice ovaries would change, another examined how the injection would affect their immune system responses to an HIV vaccine, a third looked at how the gut microbiome of the mice changed, the fourth examined how the injections affected the speed of wound healing and the fifth examined how a drug could be more or less toxic depending on hormone levels.
The first WCW report also claimed that some researchers were supported by diversity, equity and inclusion grants. The report included three screenshots of "published studies" to support this claim. However, this was a mistake — none of the three articles shared in the report were published studies. Instead, they were two editorial pieces and a review of the existing scientific literature.
That wording was changed in the second WCW report to claim that the pieces promoted "the expansion of transgender animal testing." That report said the researchers were funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the NIH and the aforementioned DEI grants. O
According to an X post from the official Department of Government Efficiency account, the NIH canceled "seven grants for transgender experiments on animals" on March 4, 2025. The post gave two examples of the canceled grants and the amounts supposedly saved.
One of the examples (for $532,000) matched the grant to study reproductive systems originally reported by WCW. However, that grant's last disbursement was in 2023. When Snopes contacted the grant's main researcher, we received an auto-reply informing us that the researcher was no longer a faculty member at the university in question.
The second example matched an active grant briefly mentioned in WCW's second report. That grant aimed to use rats to test the risks hormone therapies could have on the heart and lungs.
A brief conclusion
In the case of this claim, however, the statistics and wording White Coat Waste used in its reports were misleading and stretched the truth. Those discrepancies happened to align with the organization's mission: calling for the end of animal experimentation and the reduction of government spending.