DOGE halts gruesome transgender mice grant intended to fine-tune male hormones for women: FOIA

The Biden administration's funding for transgender experiments on animals, intended to improve so-called gender-affirming care for humans, is coming to an early end as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency and Freedom of Information Act requests by a watchdog that opposes taxpayer-funded animal tests that are shining a light on the gruesome research.

The White Coat Waste Project shared its latest FOIA production exclusively with Just the News, the protocol from a University of California San Diego study of "androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis" in mice that were "gonadectomized," injected with testosterone and decapitated.  

The watchdog also provided photos of handwritten "post-op" notes it obtained from the test animals' cages, showing which received a testosterone pellet implant versus a "sham implant," had an ovariectomy and when they were "sac'd," or killed (see below).

House Republicans have been on the feds' case about animal research perceived as cruel and superfluous, especially on dogs, since early in the Biden administration. 

The disclosures often come from WCW, which first uncovered taxpayer-funded bat research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have led to the COVID-19 pandemic and later exposed similar ongoing federally funded research at Colorado State University.

The watchdog was popular in the media until WCW scrutinized then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who called NIAID's puppy fly-biting experiments "humane" and strictly regulated at a hearing last year. WCW uncovered federally funded Chinese forced-drugging experiments on puppies this year.

Rep. Eli Crane, R-Arizona, told Just the News, No Noise last month that the House Oversight Committee documented $241 million in taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries and treatments on animals, with Fauci authorizing 95% of them.

Many of the figures cited at a recent hearing on federally funded animal cruelty came from WCW, which documented $10 million spent on transgender rodent and monkey experiments including the UCSD research, which originally had $1.23 million "obligated" for the first two years of a planned five-year study.

The UCSD study was intended to mimic "the PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] and Transgender men [human females on cross-sex hormones] androgen milieu," according to the protocol reviewed by UCSD's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Women with PCOS have high levels of androgens, whose effects on the female brain "are not well-determined," and "females taking androgen therapy to masculinize traits" can have different "reproductive hormone patterns," including luteinizing hormone secretion. "How androgens affect the brain mechanisms controlling LH pulse secretion is still not clear."

The National Institutes of Health page for the UCSD research, which says the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development administered a grant purportedly for adult females, shows a budget start date of Dec. 1, 2023 and 11 days later for the project itself. Both ended March 3, 2025, with no reason given.

As an R01 grant, which can be awarded for five 12-month budget periods, the research could have been funded through November 2028 without DOGE's intervention. 

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University of California San Diego "post op" notes from transgender mice experiments obtained in a FOIA requests by White Coat Waste Project.

White Coat Waste Project

"This R01 proposal responds to 'Notice of Special Interest in Research on the Health of Sexual and Gender Minority (SGM) Populations' … that will promote development of appropriate interventions to improve SGM health and fertility care," the NIH page says. 

"This proposal includes clinical studies of transgender individuals and the effects of androgen treatment on their reproductive health," it also says. Unlike the protocol the UCSD committee reviewed, the NIH page doesn't mention PCOS.

"We are currently assessing exposure of short term (several weeks or less) androgens on reproductive parameters of female mice to model transgender men [human females on testosterone], but many studies in the field employ longer duration androgen exposure to better mimic chronic treatment in humans," the UCSD protocol says.

"To better design future studies employing longer term androgen therapy in mice, the present study will determine how long androgen implants last in mice so that repeated implanting of new implants can be kept to a minimum," it says.

WCW also recently got a FOIA production for another canceled transgender animal study, by Harvard, titled "Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy on Breast Cancer Risk and Treatment Outcomes." The group showed Just the News an unreleased study photo of female mice with engorged nipples following ovary removal and testosterone injections.

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Female mice whose ovaries were removed and were injected with testosterone (left) to mimic “transmasculine” humans, versus controls (right).

White Coat Waste Project

DOGE announced March 5 that NIH had canceled seven grants on "transgender experiments on animals." The same day, the White House specifically mentioned the UCSD grant among six that cost taxpayers $8.2 million, to counter CNN's purported fact-check of President Trump's remarks to Congress the night before.

"Despite the mainstream media’s shameful misinformation campaign, transgender animal experiments are real – and really wasteful – and our investigation has secured the receipts for dozens more active grants that still need to be cut," WCW founder and president Anthony Bellotti said March 18.

The UCSD grant for fiscal 2025 was supposed to be $581,671, according to the archived NIH page from March 7, which would have totaled $1,229,330 from the project's fiscal 2024 start. DOGE's action meant it only received $193,890 for fiscal 2025, and $841,549 total, as documented by USAspending.gov, which shows $387,781 was rescinded March 4.

WCW estimated the total savings would be around $2.23 million based on averaging the two years of funding and assuming that amount was budgeted each year. 

DOGE's action saved roughly 7,200 mice based on the study being cut about a year and a quarter into the protocol, which sought around 9,600 mice, the group calculated.