The Department of Defense set aside millions of dollars under the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations to provide services to transgender people, a Washington Examiner review of grant records has found.
The Washington Examiner identified over $5.4 million in Pentagon grants and contracts earmarked for transgender accommodations and research, with a significant portion of them funding ongoing programs. Specific expenses borne by the public on behalf of the transgender community included medical and psychological services, diversity training, health research, and research into better integrating LGBT servicemembers into the armed forces.
News of the payments came as the Department of Government Efficiency sets its sights on the Pentagon for the next round of cuts. President Donald Trump has also taken aim specifically at diversity and transgender policies in the federal government, ending DEI programs, recognizing only two genders, and signing an executive order banning biological men from women’s sports.
One of the largest of the Defense Department contracts was awarded to Akahi Associates for over $1.3 million to provide “transgender health medical evaluation unit services” between 2022 and September 2025, according to federal spending records. The Pentagon put aside another $1.1 million between 2023 and 2026 to fund the University of California, San Diego’s research into prostate cancer risk among “transgender and gender-nonconforming adults.”
Trump, who notably moved to bar transgender individuals from military service during his first term in office, has adopted an even more critical stance toward transgenderism at the start of his second term.
“Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” an executive order signed by Trump in January says. “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
Other contracts and grants identified by the Washington Examiner included $887,000 to pay for a clinical psychologist and a team of nurses specializing in transgender care, roughly $61,000 to assist transgender women with gonorrhea, $5,000 on pro-transgender diversity training, nearly $150,000 on “LGBTQ advertising,” and approximately $2 million on “improving acceptance, integration, and health among LGBT service members.”
On top of awards explicitly related to transgenderism, records show that the Pentagon used public funds to purchase millions of dollars worth of drugs that are commonly used for transgender hormone replacement therapy or as puberty blockers. These drugs, however, have other uses not related to transgenderism, making it impossible to know, based on spending records alone, how much the department put aside for facilitating sex changes.
A Congressional Research Service report updated in January, however, reported that the Department of Defense spent roughly $15 million between 2016 and 2021 on surgical and nonsurgical transgender medical care. Beginning in June 2021, the Biden administration started providing transgender soldiers with hormone therapy, mental healthcare, and surgeries, potentially incentivizing more spending. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authored a memo on Feb. 7 calling for a pause in “all unscheduled, scheduled or planned medical procedures associated with affirming or facilitating a gender transition for service members.”
PENTAGON BANS TRANS PEOPLE FROM ENLISTING, STOPS TRANSITION PROCEDURES
While Hegseth has moved to curtail one aspect of the Pentagon’s transgender spending, multiple grants and contracts approved under prior administrations for transgender services remain ongoing. DOGE, however, has made a point of axing similar government awards at other agencies.
“There are a lot of what I would call ‘science experiments’ going on there that don’t add or don’t add enough value to the military,” Jim Fein, a Heritage Foundation national security researcher, told Fox Business. “DoD funds billions of dollars (yes, billions) in what it terms ‘basic research,’ much of which does not provide meaningful benefit to the military.”
The White House and Department of Defense did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.