‘Tis the Season to Reflect on Cruel Animal Experiments and Other Beltway

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Between year-end spending bill shenanigans, the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the changing of the guard in Washington, ‘tis the season to reflect on Beltway boondoggles.

For instance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) just released the 2024 edition of his annual Festivus waste report that highlights over $1 trillion in stupid government spending. Always appealing to the animal lovers among us, this year’s installment includes three different ridiculous multi-million-dollar “medieval-type experiments” (Paul’s words) on felines that he credits to the fine folks at White Coat Waste Project. They include a Pentagon project that shoves marbles in cats’ butts, about which Paul remarked, “Apparently, nothing says ‘national defense’ quite like torturing cats to poop marbles.”

This isn’t the only animal-abusing government waste that belongs in the litter box of history.

Days before Paul’s report dropped, White Coat Waste released another investigation exposing over $10 million in National Institutes of Health funding to create transgender lab animals.

You read that right.

These experiments, paid for in part by taxpayer-funded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) grants, involve hopping mice and monkeys up on hormones and performing invasive surgeries on animals to mimic sex changes and gender transitions.

A $2.5 million NIH grant paid University of Michigan experimenters who “developed a mouse model to mimic [testosterone] treatment for [female to male] gender transition.” One of the team’s experiments used mice to study the effects of puberty blockers and testosterone in children.

Another project has wasted over $1.1 million to study overdoses of a party drug, GHB, apparently abused by transgender people to facilitate “chemsex.” In these tests, animals are injected with sex hormones and overdoses of a “popular drug of abuse utilized at raves” to study the effects on “vulnerable female and transgender populations.”

And a pair of DEI grants from the NIH paid the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California-San Diego over $1 million to examine how “rodent models enable the study of LGBTQIA2S + health” and “Animal models of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] enable genetic manipulation and precise neuronal/molecular recordings impossible in humans.”

My Congresswoman, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), was one of the first to sound off on the testing, saying, “Of course, the Biden-Harris administration wasted millions of tax dollars on DEI grants to create transgender lab mice. DOGE should tackle this woke animal testing on Day 1.”

She’s got the right idea. Senate DOGE Caucus Chair Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told the Washington Examiner, “The NIH has taken the cheese and fell victim to the DEI trap. While I’ve spent years fighting for more research and expanding treatment options for those with metastatic breast cancer, the leading ‘health’ agency in Washington has been mousing around and spending millions on rodent sex changes. These silly science projects will be DOA in the DOGE era.”

And referencing the messy government funding fight last week, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) told the press, “Egregious government waste like tax-funded transgender animal tests is Exhibit A for why we need spending bills that Congress can actually read, debate, and defend to the American people.”

Regarding the wasteful animal tests he included in his new report, Paul wrote, “Does any of this justify the sheer cruelty these animals are subjected to? I’m guessing the American people would say no.”

The government wastes billions each year on absurd animal tests like these. With forthcoming control of Congress and the White House, conservatives can and should prioritize defunding these and other cruel and unnecessary experiments that waste money and animals’ lives.