Republican Nancy Mace has disclosed DEI programs that involved creating transgender lab animals
Around $10 million in American taxpayer funds was spent last year on experiments using “transgender lab rats,” Republican lawmaker Nancy Mace has said. She claimed the sum was an example of massive misuse of taxpayers’ money by former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Speaking on Thursday at a House Oversight Committee hearing titled ‘Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty’, Mace criticized the allocation of taxpayer funds for “gender-affirming care” in animal research. The hearing featured testimony from a representative of the White Coat Waste Project, which exposes animal testing projects.
“Why is the federal government spending taxpayer dollars to create transgender animals?” Mace demanded, referring to initiatives protecting transgender rights and programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which the federal government had established during Biden’s administration.
“Last year, the White Coat Waste Project exposed more than $10 million in taxpayer funds that were spent creating transgender mice, rats and monkeys,” the South Carolina Republican said. “These DEI grants funded painful and deadly transgender experiments that forced lab animals to undergo invasive surgeries and hormone therapies at universities across the country.”
Mace slammed the Biden administration’s policy agenda, arguing that the White House was so “eager to propagate their radical gender ideology across all facets of American society that they were surgically mutating animal genitals. Taxpayer money went to that.”
According to White Coat Waste Project’s calculations, the National Institutes of Health has spent at least $240 million over the past years in grants for “transgender animal experiments,” including $26 million in currently active projects.
“The US government spends in excess of $20 billion a year conducting experiments on animals,” Mace said. “We spent over $1 million to find out if female rats receiving testosterone therapy were more likely to overdose on a date rape drug.”
The White House has pushed against DEI programs within the federal government since Donald Trump assumed office on January 20. On his first day back in the Oval Office, the president signed orders rolling back protections for transgender individuals and terminating DEI initiatives, describing its efforts as a move to end attempts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
Last month, Trump signed an executive order banning “radical gender ideology” in the US Army, highlighting that service members must adhere to physical and mental fitness standards for duty.
Earlier this week, the US president also signed an executive order barring trans women from competing in female sports.
