At the urging of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Health and Human Services (HHS) has voluntarily ended more than $350 million in funding for woke research at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Amongst the programs that drew the ire of critics was one that took more than a million dollars to study gender identity in mice, and other programs were even more absurd.
These cuts, announced by HHS in a public statement, are just the latest in a series of significant shakeups at HHS. Over the past few months, Elon Musk and DOGE have aggressively pursued HHS for widespread graft and posted what they’ve unearthed on social media.
The demolition of the woke programs began in February, as DOGE announced in a statement celebrating the end of the wasteful contracts. They posted, “In the past 48 hours, HHS canceled 62 contracts worth $182 million. These contracts were entirely for administrative expenses—none touched any healthcare programs. This included terminating a $168,000 contract for an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the NIH Museum.”
As the investigation advanced, NIH expressed in a post their commitment to the president’s vision for public health. It said, “NIH remains committed to advancing biomedical research under NIH’s priorities and promoting radical transparency in alignment with the @POTUS agenda. Our work is driven by accountability to all Americans as we push forward in science and public health.” This statement proves that Trump has the NIH entirely under his control.
As they dug into the NIH, DOGE revealed the bizarre animal experiments, which showed the necessity of their work. They wrote, “Yesterday, @NIH canceled seven grants for transgender experiments on animals including: – $532K to “use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment” – $33K to test “feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat.4”
A few weeks later, DOGE followed up on their findings by explaining what they cut from the HHS books. They said, “Today,@NIH canceled the following grants: $620K for “an LGB+ inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys,” $699K for studying “cannabis use” among “sexual minority gender diverse individuals,” [and] $740K for examining “social networks” among “black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey. ”
However, despite these two rounds of cuts, DOGE kept investigating. At the urging of DOGE, “HHS is taking action to terminate more than $350 million in research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.”
"*" indicates required fields
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon added additional context regarding the slashed funding in a statement. He said, “The terminated research grants are simply wasteful in studying things that do not pertain to American health to any significant degree, including DEI and gender ideology. As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans.”
One of the cut programs would have given researchers at the University of Maryland-Baltimore $1 Million for a research project titled “Assessing intersectional multilevel and multidimensional structural racism for English- and Spanish-speaking populations in the US.” According to the brief, this project intended to make an “intersectional, multilevel, and multidimensional Structural Racism Measure” to “eliminate health disparities and discrimination.”