“HHS is terminating funding of research grants that are not aligned with HHS and NIH priorities,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for HHS said in an email. “Projects like studying transgender mice do not improve the health or wellbeing of Americans. HHS will continue to prioritize productive and meaningful research to deliver on our mandate to Make America Healthy Again.”
— from a March 27, 2025 Washington Post article by reporters Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Joel Achenbach.
In 2020, near the end of President Trump’s first term of office, the National Institute of Health — more affectionately known as NIH — began adding five little words to research grants awarded to universities and research institutions.
Five little words that make all the difference.
Each grant specifically stated that it could be terminated if it “…no longer effectuates agency priorities…”
And agency priorities certainly seem to have changed, lately. We’ve all heard, by now, that hundreds of million of dollars worth of federal grants for scientific research projects have been canceled by the current administration.
But you probably didn’t know that grant-funded scientists were studying transgender mice.
I certainly didn’t.
This concerns me, because, not being a scientist, I could never tell a male mouse from a female mouse, let alone from a transgender mouse. How did the scientists discover which of the mice were transgender? Don’t try and tell me “the mice started wearing earrings”, because I will know you’re lying.
Back in the days of different priorities, Congress wanted to support science at all costs. And I do mean ‘costs’. Even back in 1976, federal agencies were wasting $108 billion a year on scientific research, mostly for the Pentagon. (Thus my choice of the word, “wasting”.)
At the start of the Great Recession in 2008, our taxes were funding $230 billion worth of ‘science’ annually… adjusted for inflation…
…once again, mostly for the military. $130 billion, to research better ways to kill people.
The next biggest chunk was going to the NIH. $46 billion, presumably for making America healthy again. (We had become rather unhealthy.) In many cases, scientists did their experiments on mice, because mice can’t vote.
Better ways to heal people, or better ways to kill people. It’s all the same to Congress.
Last year, the Pentagon got $101 billion to spend on military robots and whatever else they think useful, and the NIH got $44 billion to study transgender mice, and similar research. Counting all the agency grants for science research, $200 billion.
So we can see that science funding never quite ‘recovered’ from the Great Recession, the same way the rest of us did. (We did recover, didn’t we?)
I haven’t been able to put my finger on the total dollar amount of science grants that have been canceled to date by the current administration, partly because the news media finds it too depressing to reveal the number, and partly because a string of federal judges have ordered the administration to keep funding the transgender mice studies, and of course the new weapons.
Admittedly, the administration doesn’t hold judges in the highest regard, so we don’t know where this whole thing is ultimately headed. It could be The End of Science in America, or A Temporary Delay in Wasting Taxpayers’ Money.
In somewhat related news, Su-Il In, a professor at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology, presented his team’s findings at the American Chemical Society Spring 2025 meeting this week.
The Institute claims to have developed a radiation-powered battery that can put out electricity for 50 years — or longer — without recharging.
Puts the Energizer Bunny to shame.
The new Betavoltaic battery uses a radioactive isotope of carbon — a cheap by-product of nuclear power plants — because it generates only (relatively harmless) beta rays. And electricity too, of course.
Reportedly, the Chinese company is already mass-producing the new batteries.
The Chinese Communist Party has been steadily increasing their government investment in science, while the American Republican Party is slashing our investment, which had already been slipping downhill. At the rate things are going, we’re still going to be plugging in our phones every night for the next 50 years.
And we still won’t understand anything about transgender mice.