The National Institutes of Health just awarded $584,117 to a UC San Diego lab to continue an experiment that involves castrating mice, injecting them with testosterone, drilling into their skulls, pumping toxins into their brains, and then cutting their heads off. The purpose? “Fine-tuning” male hormone doses for women who identify as men.
And people say the government doesn’t listen to taxpayers. Oh wait — they don’t. DOGE already killed this grant. Biden holdovers in the NIH brought it back.
Here’s the timeline, because it’s the kind of bureaucratic middle finger that would make even the most jaded taxpayer throw something at a wall.
The study — formally titled “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis” — was originally funded by NIH to the tune of $646,301 in fiscal year 2025. When DOGE identified the grant as part of its sweep of wasteful federal spending, the funding was terminated. Done. Cut. The system worked.
Then a group of blue-state attorneys general ran to federal court. The case, Massachusetts et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. et al., resulted in a judge ruling that NIH’s terminations were “arbitrary and capricious” and ordering the agency to restore funding to hundreds of studies — including the UC San Diego mouse experiment.
But here’s the loophole NIH drove a truck through.
The court order applied only to grants within their existing budget periods. The UC San Diego grant’s budget period ended on November 30, 2025. Once that date passed, NIH had no legal obligation under the court order to keep funding the study. They could have let it expire. They could have walked away. The court didn’t force them to issue a new grant.
They issued a new grant anyway. On January 16, 2026 — six weeks after the old one expired — NIH cut a fresh check for $584,117 to restart the exact same research that DOGE had defunded and that RFK Jr.’s team said they had stopped.
Let’s be extremely specific about what this money pays for.
The researchers at UC San Diego take mice — nearly 10,000 of them, according to White Coat Waste Project — and perform gonadectomies. That’s surgical removal of the reproductive organs. Then they inject the mice with testosterone. Then they drill holes in the mice’s skulls. Then they inject brain toxins through those holes. Then they decapitate the mice and examine the brains.
The goal, according to the grant application, is to better understand how testosterone affects the “reproductive neuroendocrine axis” — which is science-speak for figuring out how to dose male hormones for biological women transitioning to male. They’re torturing and killing thousands of mice to calibrate transgender hormone therapy.
This is what $584,117 of your money bought. And that’s just the new grant. The total so far — fiscal 2025 plus fiscal 2026 — is $1,230,418. For mouse decapitation in the service of gender ideology.
Justin Goodman from the White Coat Waste Project put it bluntly: “The NIH is openly defying President Trump and blowing up claims from RFK’s team that it had stopped funding transgender animal tests.”
Rep. Paul Gosar called it what it is: “Tax dollars shouldn’t be funding transgender animal tests. This is woke pseudoscience.”
Here’s what makes this one particularly infuriating. NIH didn’t accidentally fund this. They didn’t get trapped by a court order. The court order had already expired for this grant. NIH made a deliberate, conscious decision to write a new check for a study that the President wanted killed, that DOGE had killed, and that RFK Jr.’s team publicly claimed was dead.
This is the Deep State telling you exactly what it thinks of your elections. You voted for DOGE. You voted for spending cuts. You voted to end this exact kind of wasteful nonsense. And a bureaucrat at NIH — whose name you’ll never know, whose face you’ll never see — sat at a desk on January 16th and signed a $584,117 check to fund castrating mice and drilling into their skulls so that doctors can better dose testosterone for gender transitions.
That’s your money. That’s a bureaucrat who can’t be fired telling you and the President of the United States to go pound sand.
NIH also quietly funds a parallel human study at UC San Diego — trial number NCT07092527 — examining “menstrual disruption” in women receiving testosterone therapy. That study was last updated on January 15, 2026. One day before the mouse study got its new funding.
If you’re wondering whether anyone at NIH will face consequences for overriding a presidential priority and restarting a defunded program through a procedural loophole — don’t hold your breath. The same civil service protections that make it nearly impossible to fire a federal employee also make it nearly impossible to stop one from spending your money on whatever ideology they happen to subscribe to.
DOGE can cut the check. A court can let the cut stand. And a GS-15 with a cause can write a new one the next morning. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system.
Until that changes, they’ll keep decapitating the mice. On your dime.