What Your Tax Dollars Are Quietly Funding In The Trans Kids Debate

President Donald Trump has cracked down on transgender procedures for kids since returning to office. But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from funding a radical doctor’s $3 million study on puberty blockers.

The National Institute of Mental Health approved $728,119 in February 2026 for a project on puberty blockers based out of the Research Institute Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. One of the principal investigators of the project, Dr. John Strang, is closely affiliated with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH has faced criticism over its shoddy science and accusations that its recommendations are driven by ideology.

Strang’s project entails 132 “transgender adolescents” at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, according to its description. Half of the kids would be on puberty blockers while the other half would not, according to researchers. Researchers leading the project hope to “clarify its potential protective and risk effects to support optimization and personalization of treatment protocols.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that puberty blockers are not safe for gender-confused children, and has issued several directives going after hospitals and doctors that push transgender procedures on kids. But HHS downplayed the radical nature of the grant in a statement to The Daily Wire, saying that the project in question does not involve giving puberty blockers to kids, but recruits patients from gender clinics considering going on puberty blockers.

“HHS continues to fight to protect America’s children from irreversible harm outlined in the Department’s peer-reviewed report,” an official told The Daily Wire. “These detrimental procedures do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care, and practitioners who perform sex-rejecting procedures on minors would be deemed out of compliance with those standards.”

In total, the project has been awarded $3,741,119 in federal funding between 2021-2024 and 2026. The project did not get funding in 2025, a decision that appears to have been made in March 2025, according to spending records.

The American Accountability Foundation, which has sued the NIH for more information on its transgender experiments, said that the funding shows the need for increased oversight.

“DOGE did some great work, but I’ve been around Washington long enough to know that if you don’t keep your eyes on the deep state they’ll resume the same bad behavior the moment you look away,” Tom Jones, the organization’s president, told The Daily Wire.

The Trump administration suspended 1,800 NIH grants determined to be related to DEI or other radical topics between February 2025 and June 2025. The NIH later agreed to review grants on a standardized case-by-case basis in a settlement after a lawsuit from a number of organizations that lost federal funding. Many of the projects impacted were kept sealed from the public record, making it difficult to determine exactly which grants were involved.

Nothing in the agreement “diminishes or enlarges NIH’s discretion over the decision to award funding, or creates a final agency action where a final agency action would not otherwise exist,” the settlement agreement said.

The puberty blocker project’s public description notes that puberty blockers are “endorsed” by WPATH and claims that initial studies show “mental health benefits for transgender youth” put on puberty blockers. Puberty blockers can seriously impact bone density, sexual development, and fertility, and can cause vision issues and lead to brain swelling. Many medical experts have rejected the claims of advocates for transgender procedures that puberty blockers are fully reversible.

Strang runs the gender and autism program at Children’s National and is on faculty with the Global Education Institute for WPATH. The gender program at Children’s National currently does not provide so-called “gender-affirming care” medical treatments because of “escalating legal and regulatory risks,” but it does offer “mental health” services. Before Trump took office, the hospital performed multiple transgender surgeries and had 47 patients on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, according to the Stop the Harm database.

Throughout 2025, Strang participated in a number of WPATH workshops for health care professionals “committed to advancing affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse” patients.

Additionally, Strang contributed to the standards of care produced by WPATH that recommended that doctors tell adolescents about “chest binding and genital tucking,” put girls on “menstrual suppression agents” if they don’t want to go on testosterone, and leave the door open for doctors to recommend “puberty suppression, hormone initiation, or gender-related surgery for gender diverse and transgender adolescents.”

Other researchers on the project include Dr. Diane Chen and Dr. Eric Nelson, who is listed as the project leader.

Nelson is a principal investigator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Center for Biobehavioral Health and is a professor at Ohio State University College of Medicine. He is the co-author of a study on mental health concerns for gender-confused youth.

Chen is a researcher and doctor with the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she has focused on transgender issues. At Lurie, she “has worked clinically with transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse young people and youth and young adults with differences of sex development/intersex variations since 2013.”

Chen was involved with a seperate expansive $9.7 million NIH-funded study that experimented on kids by giving them puberty blockers. In February 2023, Chen published a study based on research funded by another NIH grant claiming that giving kids cross-sex hormones improves their “mental health.”

“Our results provide robust scientific evidence that improved appearance congruence secondary to hormone treatment is strongly linked to better mental health outcomes in transgender and nonbinary youth,” she said at the time.

That assessment contrasts directly with the conclusions reached by the Trump administration in May 2025 that medical interventions for minors experiencing gender confusion are not supported by science and that the risks of the procedures are high.