A group of House Republicans are requesting Fiscal Year 2026 spending bills to include language prohibiting federal funding for transgender experiments on animals. 

Republican Reps. Paul Gosar, Elijah Crane, Abraham J. Hamadeh of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Brandon Gill of Texas, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Pete Stauber of Minnesota and Troy E. Nehls of Texas are urging the chairman and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies to prohibit transgender experiments on animals in its FY2026 appropriations bill. 

House Republicans have requested the committee include the following language: ‘None of the funds made available by this or any other Act thereafter may be used for research on vertebrate animals for the purpose of studying the effects of drugs, surgery, or other interventions to alter the human body (including by disrupting the body’s development, inhibiting its natural functions, or modifying its appearance) to no longer correspond to its biological sex.’

The letter, addressed to Chairman Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., and Ranking Member Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., points to the dozens of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants issued during former President Joe Biden’s administration that are funding ‘wasteful and disturbing experiments to create ‘transfeminine’ and ‘transmasculine’ lab animals using invasive surgeries and hormone therapies.’

‘The transgender animals are then wounded, shocked, injected with street drugs and vaccines, and subjected to other disturbing procedures,’ the House Republicans said in the letter, as Fox News Digital reported earlier this year. 

‘President Trump has personally criticized these experiments on several occasions, and the Department of Government Efficiency has canceled millions in NIH grants funding transgender animal testing. However, many of these NIH grants funding gender transitions for lab animals are still active,’ House GOP members said. 

President Donald Trump condemned transgender animal experiments during his joint address to Congress in March. The White Coat Waste Project, a government watchdog group that testified about transgender animal experiments on Capitol Hill earlier this year, told Fox News Digital there are still ’29 active taxpayer-funded grants that have been used to fund transgender animal tests.’

‘We urge you to include the language above in the FY26 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies bill to ensure no more taxpayer dollars are wasted to fund transgender animal tests,’ the Republicans said in the letter. 

The White Coat Waste Project, in a statement to Fox News Digital, touted their role in halting taxpayer-funded ‘transgender animal tests,’ and celebrated the House Republicans’ bill, led by Gosar, to stop more federally funded experiments. 

‘Thanks to White Coat Waste’s viral investigations and collaboration with Rep. Paul Gosar and others in Congress, the Trump Administration has slashed spending on wasteful experiments that subject lab animals to invasive surgeries and hormone therapies to crudely mimic gender transitions in kids and adults and then wound, shock and inject the animals with vaccines and overdoses of sex party drugs,’ Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President of White Coat Waste Project, said. 

‘These Trump cuts have already saved thousands of lab animals and millions of tax dollars, but dozens more NIH grants that funnel tax dollars to disturbing transgender animal tests are still active. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for wasteful and cruel transgender animal tests, and Rep. Gosar’s commonsense effort to permanently defund them will ensure they won’t have to.’

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury Department payments. 

Prior to the discovery, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional for $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments, so they were often left blank and were untraceable. The field is now required to increase ‘insight into where the money is actually going,’ the Treasury Department and DOGE announced in February. 

‘Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,’ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government earlier this month. 

Fox News Digital asked Republican senators on Capitol Hill to respond to the approximately 500,000 in untraceable payments made by the Treasury Department each year. 

‘I’m not surprised at all, unfortunately,’ Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said before adding, ‘They were leaving complete fields undone when they were filling out their financials, so this is a common theme. I’m not surprised.’

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, called for an investigation into where those payments actually went. 

‘There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government,’ Schmitt told Fox News Digital. ‘I’m glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money actually went. I mean this is taxpayer money. People work hard.’

After DOGE and the Treasury Department uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable funds, Marshall and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced a bill in March requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments. 

The Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act seeks to increase transparency in how the Treasury Department spends taxpayer money. 

‘When you hear about this story that they didn’t know where the money was going, it makes you mad because this is somebody’s money, this is taxpayers’ money when we have almost $37 trillion in debt, so this makes no sense at all,’ Scott said. 

The Congressional Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will total $952 billion in fiscal year 2025. That’s $102 billion more than the United States’ defense budget at $850 billion. 

‘We paid out more last year on our debt, $36 trillion in debt, with $950 billion in interest going to bondholders all over the world, including in China. That $950 billion didn’t go to build a bridge or an F-35. We paid more on the interest on debt than we did to fund our military,’ said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska. 

‘That is an inflection point that when most countries hit, you look at history, that’s when great powers start to decline. So we have to get those savings.’

President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin about ending the war in Ukraine, hosted the president of South Africa at the White House and threatened more stringent tariffs against the European Union this week. 

During South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Oval Office visit on Wednesday, Trump got into a testy exchange with the South African leader about the treatment of White farmers there. Specifically, Trump aired a video that showed white crosses that Trump said were approximately 1,000 burial sites of White Afrikaner South African farmers. 

Trump has repeatedly asserted these farmers are being killed and pushed off of their land.

Trump told Ramaphosa at the White House that the burial sites by the side of the road are visited by those who want to ‘pay respects to their family member who was killed.’ 

‘Now this is very bad. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites — over a thousand — of White farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there is approximately a thousand of them,’ Trump said. ‘They’re all White farmers. The family of White farmers. And those cars aren’t driving, they are stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed. And it’s a terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it. On both sides of the road, you have crosses. Those people are all killed.’

‘Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?’ Ramaphosa said. ‘I’d like to know where that is. Because this I’ve never seen.’ 

‘I mean, it’s in South Africa, that’s where,’ Trump said. 

‘We need to find out,’ Ramaphosa said.

The White House defended showing the clip and said that the video was ‘substantiated,’ following reports that emerged after the encounter that said the crosses were from a memorial demonstration following the murder of a White farming couple, not actual burial sites.

Here’s what also happened this week:

Call with Putin 

Trump and Putin spoke over the phone on Monday to advance peace negotiations ending the war between Moscow and Kyiv. The call occurred just days after Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey to conduct their first peace talks since 2022. 

After the call, Trump said both countries would move toward a ceasefire and push discussions to end the war. But, Trump indicated that the U.S. would let Moscow and Kyiv take the lead on negotiations after his call with Putin. 

‘The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know the details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of,’ Trump said in a Monday post on Truth Social. 

Additionally, Trump has continued to distance the U.S. from the conflict this week, describing the conflict as a ‘European situation.’ 

‘Big egos involved, but I think something’s going to happen,’ Trump told reporters on Monday. ‘And if it doesn’t, I’ll just back away and they’ll have to keep going. This was a European situation. It should have remained a European situation.’

Trump expressed similar sentiments on Wednesday when Ramaphosa visited and stated: ‘It’s not our people, it’s not our soldiers… it’s Ukraine and it’s Russia.’ 

‘Evils of antisemitism’

The White House condemned the fatal attack against two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, labeling that incident an act of antisemitism. 

A gunman opened fire and killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. The two were planning to get engaged next week in Jerusalem, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing.

Authorities arrested a pro-Palestinian man identified as 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago in connection with the attack, according to officials.

In response, Trump and other leaders of his administration said attacks like these must stop and said that those responsible will face justice. 

‘These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!’ Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. ‘Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA. Condolences to the families of the victims. So sad that such things as this can happen! God Bless You ALL!’

Leavitt later told reporters she’d spoken with Attorney General Pam Bondi and that those who conducted the attack would face prosecution. 

‘The evil of antisemitism must be eradicated from our society,’ Leavitt told reporters on Thursday. ‘I spoke to the attorney general this morning. The Department of Justice will be prosecuting the perpetrator responsible for this to the fullest extent of the law. Hatred has no place in the United States of America under President Donald Trump.’

EU tariff threats

Trump threatened to slap a 50% tariff on imports from the European Union on Friday amid ongoing trade negotiations and after locking down a trade deal with the U.K. 

The deal with the U.K. is the first historic trade negotiation signed following Liberation Day, when Trump announced widespread tariffs for multiple countries on April 2 at a range of rates. 

The administration later adjusted its initial proposal and announced on April 9 it would immediately impose a 145% tariff on Chinese goods, while reducing reciprocal tariffs on other countries and the EU to a baseline of 10% for 90 days. 

‘Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable,’ Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday about the EU. 

‘Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025,’ he said. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later said in an interview with Fox News he hoped the warning would ‘light a fire under the EU’ and signaled Trump’s threats stemmed from frustration negotiating with European countries on trade deals. 

‘EU proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners,’ Bessent said. 

Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.