Lawmakers Call for Defunding as Report Reveals Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Spent on Gender Ideology

The federal government spent more than $174 million promoting gender ideology in the past three years, according to a new report. In one example of many, the State Department issued a taxpayer-funded grant to premiere “The Vagina Monologues” in India. Two lawmakers say the waste must end.  

Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, and Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., called on their colleagues Thursday to use the appropriations and budget reconciliation processes to cut support for gender ideology and to work toward banning transgender surgery for minors. A recent report from the national pro-family American Principles Project uncovered the details of hundreds of grants and contracts approved by the federal government to further gender ideology from 2021-2024.  

“DOGE isn’t enough,” Banks said at an event hosted by the American Principles Project. “What Elon and DOGE and the Trump administration is doing in zeroing out these programs is only temporary if Congress doesn’t do its job to make it permanent. That’s our big takeaway.” 

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Banks was referring to the Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk that is working to root out waste and abuse in government spending as well as to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning all programs within the federal government that promote gender ideology. A presidential executive order can be reversed by a subsequent president, which is why Banks is encouraging Congress to pass a law to make it permanent. 

The report has given Congress the ammunition to do just that, he said.  

Grants and contracts listed in the report include more than $3 million from the Department of Health and Human Services for the Children’s Hospital Corporation to transform “health for gender-diverse youth using interventions to drive equity”; a $600,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture for Southern University A&M to study menstrual cycles in “transgender men and people with masculine gender identities, intersex, and nonbinary persons”; and more than $24,000 from the Department of State to premiere “The Vagina Monologues” in the Gujarati language in Mumbai and Ahmedabad, India.  

Banks called the report “groundbreaking,” noting that some of the exposed funding was approved before President Joe Biden took office, during the first Trump administration. 

As chairman of the Republican Study Committee in 2021, Banks told Republicans to lean into the culture war. Under the second Trump administration, he said Republicans now have the leadership needed to fight the culture war as DOGE also identifies wasteful spending on it. 

Chloe Cole is a young woman who surgically “transitioned” into a boy in her early teens and then “detransitioned” a few years later. She is a fierce critic of gender ideology and said that Trump’s recent executive orders targeting gender ideology are excellent and speak to a cultural change in our nation, but the fight against woke ideology is not over.  

“While it’s wonderful that we started throwing the punches so early on in the administration … these need to be codified into law, and these laws need to be upheld in court federally,” Cole, who was at the event, said. “I think that we need to ban the transitioning of minors.”  

Gill told The Daily Signal he supports a federal ban on gender transition for minors. Meanwhile, he said Congress needs to shift with the broader culture and Republicans need to beat Democrats at the ballot box if the Democratic Party continues to dig in on gender ideology. 

“I think we need to continue putting pedal to the floor and making these positions so untenable that even Democrats in moderate seats can’t vote against us,” Gill told The Daily Signal. “We’re not there yet, but the more that we can highlight stories of high school girls getting beat up on a basketball court by transgender guys … the more we can get the [Sen.] John Fettermans and some of the Democrats who are maybe a little bit more amendable to us to get on board.” 

Gill said Congress should support the administration’s efforts to root out wasteful spending through an appropriations process that strips taxpayer funding from organizations promoting gender ideology.  

“Fundamentally, we have to rightsize our appropriations budget to take this stuff out, to make these cuts permanent,” Gill said. “That’s going to take far more political will, I think, than it should. But it’s really a matter of putting the pedal to the floor so we can get these recission bills [bills that rescind funding that was previously appropriated] done as quickly as possible.”