'Transgender monkeys'? Musk highlights misleading posts in push for new Government Efficiency group

As Elon Musk launches the Department of Government Efficiency to recommend spending cuts, he has highlighted examples of what he considers waste.

Musk, an entrepreneur, amplified posts on his X platform that said the government funded research on "transgender" monkeys, cats on treadmills and "alcoholic rats" sprayed with bobcat urine.

"Some of this stuff is not merely a waste of money, but outright evil," Musk wrote Nov. 13.

"Your tax dollars at ‘work,’" Musk said Nov. 12 with a laughing with tears emoji.

Musk said he wants the federal government to cut "at least $2 trillion," or almost 30% of what the U.S. government spent in 2024. Trump didn’t specify a target amount for the group, led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, but he set July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as a deadline for identifying cuts. The department can make recommendations, but Congress has the power of the purse.

Many federal research projects Musk cited overlap with findings in annual "Festivus" reports about government spending by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who said Musk and Ramaswamy can use his reports as "inspiration."  (Festivus is the holiday from "Seinfeld" launched by George Constanza’s father to air grievances with his family over the past year.) 

Some projects stretch back decades. For example, one list on X compiled by Dillon Loomis, host of the YouTube show "Electrified," called out Agriculture Department credit card spending on "concert tickets, tattoos, lingerie and car payments." This came from a 2003 government audit.

Musk boosted another X post by The Redheaded Libertarian that said the government spent $4.5 million "to spray alcoholic rates with bobcat urine" in 2020. Podcast host Josie Glabach runs that account.

PolitiFact has a long history of investigating claims from politicians about purportedly wasteful projects involving animals, including one about exotic ants and monkeys on cocaine. Crazy as they sound, many of the projects are real (though not the one that said $2.6 million went to teach prostitutes in China to drink responsibly). 

Medical research has long been a bipartisan target for criticism, said Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

"Whether tequila makes fish angry, shrimp on a treadmill are two projects that come to mind," Sewell said. "You comb through the NIH and other agencies and there are a lot of weird sounding studies — at least superficially." ("Shrimp on a treadmill" became a shorthand for government waste, and the fish study was decades ago.)

Many complaints exclude the problems the research is trying to address, which might change how people perceive its value. In the case of these new examples Musk cited, the money went largely to research and academic institutions over several years to study animals to solve health problems in humans.

Here’s a closer look at the details behind the projects shorthanded on social media.

Loomis claimed "$33.2M was spent on transgender monkey research." That is false. It conflates spending on a monkey lab research site with a single study.

Paul’s 2023 report said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent $477,121 on a "transgender monkey study." 

The National Institutes of Health awarded three projects for $477,121 starting in 2020 to Scripps Florida for research that included administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to study whether the medication makes the monkeys more susceptible to HIV. The study also examined how hormone therapy affected the monkeys' response to HIV treatments. 

Transgender women are at high risk for contracting HIV, accounting for disproportionate numbers of new infections around the world, the World Health Organization said.

The $33.2 million spending figure refers to a monkey colony, but that’s not specifically for transgender research. The Post and Courier, a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper, reported in 2023 that the monkey site has existed since the 1970s and is home to about 3,500 rhesus monkeys that are sent to researchers working on vaccines and medical treatments.

The monkey site was in the news in November because 43 monkeys escaped; as of this writing the majority had been recovered. 

The Redheaded Libertarian account’s post claims the government spent $4.5 million in 2020 to "spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine." That was a real study, but it was not the only thing the grants, which were spent over several years, funded. 

Paul’s 2020 Festivus report says researchers used $4.575 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs "to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine."  

The underlying research aimed to study alcoholism in humans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The money went to Louisiana State University’s Health Sciences Center to study the chemical processes behind alcoholism, most of it funded over several years by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. 

A LSU Health New Orleans spokesperson said the grants totaled about $5.6 million from 2014 to 2024. The goal of the work is to improve care for people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder. This work has led to the discovery of brain changes that may drive excessive alcohol use in people diagnosed with PTSD.

One study examined post-traumatic stress avoidance in rats when exposed to predator odor (bobcat urine) to better understand how to treat PTSD in humans. The predator odor causes a trauma response in the rats, simulating trauma responses in humans.

The Redheaded Libertarian account mentioned "$2.7M on studying cats on a treadmill." The amount is correct, but it left out the research’s intention of trying to understand spinal cord therapies for humans. 

The National Institutes of Health gave about $2.7 million in federal funding from 2018 to 2021 to a project studying spinal cord injuries’ effects on cats’ walking patterns.

Researchers in the U.S., Sweden and Russia collaborated on the research until it ended in 2022.

According to a project summary, the researchers studied neural processes involved in a common treatment for spinal cord injuries. The project’s goal was providing "a scientific basis for improvement of (epidural spinal cord)-stimulation therapies" to improve mobility in humans.

Researchers performed surgery on cats for the study, removing sections of their spinal cords. In several studies, researchers observed how the cats with severed spinal cords walked on treadmills. 

In one study of cats in Russia, researchers found it was easier to stimulate forward motion over backward motion when using epidural spinal cord stimulation on the cats. Another study used transdermal stimulation, a different therapy, and found the approach useful for "investigating new approaches of neurorehabilitation after spinal cord and brain injury and diseases."  

The Redheaded Libertarian’s post said the government spent a "portion of $12M to study monkeys on meth." That was one of dozens of studies funded by National Institute on Drug Abuse grants to study ways to treat and prevent drug addiction.  

Paul’s 2023 report highlighted that study, which involved giving methamphetamine to monkeys to study the drug’s effects on sleep and insomnia. 

The study lists four National Institutes of Health grants as its funding source. The funding from those grants over more than two decades totals close to $12 million, but the grants have supported more than one study.

One of those grants has funded a project researching benzodiazepine use in rhesus monkeys since 1998. The project has received federal funding nearly every year, totaling more than $7 million as of 2024. Researchers have published dozens of studies connected to that grant funding, according to a project summary on the National Institutes of Health website.

The Redheaded Libertarian post said "a portion of $12M went to study dog rectal temperatures." A researcher said the "portion" amounted to borrowing a camera for one day. 

 Paul’s report said the Agriculture Department awarded an unknown sum of money to Southern Illinois University to study "dog rectal temperatures." 

The 2019 study found evidence that contradicted the popular belief that dogs with darker fur experience greater thermal change when exposed to sunlight than dogs with lighter fur, since their internal temperatures adjusted at the same rate. Researchers measured rectal, gastrointestinal and surface temperatures. 

A sentence in the study says the study was partially supported by a USDA grant. One researcher, Erin Perry, told PolitiFact that the USDA funding acknowledgement was required because the study used a thermal camera purchased with a USDA grant for an unrelated project and lent to the dog project for one day. She said no government funding was used for the dog study.

There was a human-connection to this study. Perry said that heatstroke is the leading cause of operational- or training-related death in dogs used for military, law enforcement and search and rescue purposes.

Some targeted researchers take criticism of their projects with a chuckle. Robert Kraut, professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, studied the evolution of human facial expressions, which he said was one of the first published experiments  "in what would eventually become evolutionary psychology." But in 1980, Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., awarded the National Institute for Mental Health a Golden Fleece Award for funding the research. (Proxmire gave Golden Fleece Awards to public officials tongue in cheek for apparently squandering public money.)

Kraut wrote that he put it on a T-shirt.

"Although my work was not nearly as sexy as the research on class relationships in Peruvian brothels, conducted by an earlier Golden Fleece Award winner (van den Berghe & Primov, 1979), it did get media attention," Kraut wrote. "This may have been the first time that non-specialists, except for my wife and mother, had ever read one of my papers, and I gloried in the brief media attention."

Leaders from the American Psychological Association and the Consortium of Social Science Associations wrote in a 2014 essay that politicians who attack such projects are overlooking research’s value for solving human problems. The authors wrote that the "NIH peer-review process — rigorous and highly competitive — winnows out unworkable or low-priority ideas."

Research related to the venom of the Gila monster, a lizard, may once have sounded fantastical. But it has a real-world impact.

In the 1990s, researchers studied a hormone in Gila monster venom that helps the lizard regulate its blood sugar during hibernation, KFF wrote. Researchers then created a synthetic version of the hormone, which led to a new class of drugs including Ozempic, which the Food and Drug administration approved to treat diabetes but became popular as an off-label weight-loss drug. 

"The Gila monster’s venom is not present in those drugs," KFF wrote.

RELATED:  Ask PolitiFact: What are Donald Trump’s second-term plans for the economy, immigration, abortion?