Trump Claimed the NIH Spent $8 Million 'Making Mice Transgender,' Which Is Actually Partly True

The NIH has given numerous grants to researchers who have used animal models, including mice, to study the impacts and safety of cross-sex hormones. But nobody is "making mice transgender."

At his bombastic speech before Congress on Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump boasted that Elon Musk and the DOGE gang had exposed $8 million in federal funding “for making mice transgender.”

I examined this eyebrow-raising moment in an editorial I published today in the Washington Post: “Science needs more shrimp on treadmills: National Institutes of Health isn’t funding too much silly science. It’s not funding enough.”

My essay sings the praises of what’s sometimes known as silly science. The classic example is a study of shrimps scurrying on a treadmill, one that former Republican Senator Tom Coburn first made a fuss over in 2011. The meme makes routine resurgences, including a mention by iconoclastic Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday for his appointment as head of the National Institutes of Health.

Silly science, I write, is oftentimes just a proxy for what’s known as edge science, or early-stage exploratory research. And edge…