GOP senator's 'Federal Fumbles' report highlights $240M spent on transgender rat testing

FIRST ON FOX: A new report from a Senate Republican showed that in the last year, the federal government wasted millions on transgender animal tests, lab testing beagles in China and aborted fetal tissue research. 

In his 9th annual edition of "Federal Fumbles," Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., found several instances of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, and he laid out a game plan to address some of the shortcomings of the past year. 

Lankford noted that after the first year of President Donald Trump's second term, the Republican-controlled Congress was able to improve efficiency, save billions in taxpayer dollars and redefine spending in Washington, D.C. 

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"However, the work is far from over," Lankford wrote in the report.

"Too often, the federal government is gridlocked, unresponsive and inefficient," he continued. "We must continue pushing through bureaucratic red tape to make the government work better for you, the taxpayer. We have so much still to do."

Some of the more egregious examples of federal waste laid out in the report included a handful of grant programs from the National Institute of Health (NIH) held over from the Biden administration.

Among those were a roughly $240 million study on transgender "animal experiments involving mice, rats and monkeys." That grant program was eventually terminated by Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

"These NIH-funded studies attempted to model transgender adults and children by subjecting animals to hormone regimens and surgical procedures," Lankford wrote. 

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In 2024, the Biden-led NIH funded $53 million worth of grants that allowed for "research using human fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions." And last year it was found that 17 of those grants were still active. 

Lankford noted that the NIH canceled the grants when the money flow became public after watchdog the White Coat Waste Project found that the agency was still funding them, and that the Trump administration went a step further to cancel all research involving aborted fetal tissue. 

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Still, Lankford argued that unless Congress passed a law regarding the issue, "another pro-abortion Administration could resume or expand such projects at any time, forcing taxpayers to fund research that is both immoral and scientifically obsolete."

Though the sums were not as eye-popping, Lankford also found that $124,000 in taxpayer money was sent to China to conduct drug research and experiments on "up to 300 beagles per week." 

Lankford said NIH announced it would not renew the contract after national scrutiny, but that there are still "18 Chinese animal research laboratories, including several with troubling ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army, [that] still hold NIH approval to receive U.S. funding."