President Biden proudly promoted transgender policies and programs during his administration and it cost taxpayers more than $100 million.
Some of the money was just recently flowing out of government coffers to pay initiatives including an ongoing breast cancer screening pilot program for men who identify as women, which comes with a price tag of $420,386.
Other government expenditures show the Biden administration’s willingness to spend big on promoting transgender policies in the federal workplace.
President Trump is moving to end the funding and has signed a string of executive orders aimed at ridding the federal government of trans policies, programs and spending, which he has labeled “transgender lunacy.”
His latest executive order, signed Wednesday, prohibits men from competing in women’s sports. If a school violates the new edict, Mr. Trump warned in a White House ceremony, “there will be no federal funding.”
Earlier this week, he sought to shut the spigot of all federal funding on transgender initiatives.
The administration closed the USAID headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington as officials began combing through the department’s hefty spending on transgender and DEI initiatives in foreign countries.
The department spent significant sums on advancing transgender advocacy, including right inside the USAID building.
Nearly $900,000 in taxpayer money was spent constructing gender-neutral restrooms inside the Reagan Building.
The National Institutes of Health spent $1.12 million for a single gender-neutral bathroom on the first floor of a building on its Bethesda, Maryland campus. The design fees added up to $123,320. The government paid more than $1 million in addition to that for the construction of the bathroom.
Another $1 million was spent helping New York convert the men’s and women’s bathrooms at Letchworth State Park into gender-neutral restrooms, which, according to the grant summary, “will address a changing view of gender concerns.”
Overall, the Biden administration spent at least $3 million on building gender-neutral restrooms in a handful of government buildings.
The bathroom spending adds to the more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars spent under the Biden administration studying and advancing transgender initiatives at home and abroad.
The State Department, for example, spent $50,000 in Hyderabad and Chennai, India, “to sensitize employees of corporate entities,” to transgender people in the workplace. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts gave $25,000 to the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month banning federal funding for gender transition-related health care for children. The government had already spent millions, handed out by the Biden administration, studying transgender treatments in youth.
Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, for example, received $1.7 million in federal funding for an ongoing study of blood clot risks in transgender adolescents and young adults who receive hormone therapy. The study describes hormone therapy, which can cause irreversible changes, as “one of the most effective interventions for treating gender dysphoria” in transgender youth.
The investigative think tank Capital Research Center combed through government data on transgender spending and, according to researcher Parker Thayer, the total amount spent is likely even higher as the Biden administration pumped money into the projects ahead of his departure from the White House.
The data show that grants ranged from tens of thousands for smaller transgender initiatives to millions of dollars for long-range scientific studies, much of it centered on mental health issues and health problems, such as HIV transmission, in transgender individuals.
The NIH provided Emory University with $5 million to study transgender women, who are biological men, living with HIV.
Much of the money handed out by the Biden administration has already been spent but some of the programs are ongoing and are poised to lose funding in the new Trump-era.
Mr. Trump is facing significant pushback from the LGBTQ community.
The group PFLAG and the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights filed a lawsuit against Mr. Trump to try to block his order cutting off funding for youth transgender services.
The lawsuit called Mr. Trump’s executive order discriminatory and dangerous. As a result, the lawsuit claims, hospitals across the country are “abruptly halting medical care for transgender people under nineteen, canceling appointments and turning away some patients who have waited years to receive medically necessary care for gender dysphoria.”
Mr. Trump, however, is not backing down.
“Every day we are eliminating the extremism of the last four years,” he said Wednesday.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.