Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge of going against woke health clinics, the National Institute of Mental Health approved $728,119 in February 2026 for a study on puberty blockers.
By Catholics for Catholics
Donald Trump has implemented a crackdown on transgender procedures like no other president before him, but that has not stopped the federal government from handing over $3 million of taxpayer money to a woke doctor to conduct a study on puberty blockers.
According to a story by The Daily Wire, The National Institute of Mental Health greenlit $728,119 in February 2026 for a program on puberty blockers based out of the Research Institute Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. John Strang is one of the main investigators of the project; he is strongly linked with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Because of its alleged shoddy science and accusations that its recommendations are driven by ideology, WPATH has faced criticism.
Case in point is Strang’s project, which involves 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. According to researchers, half of the kids would be on puberty blockers while the other half would not.
Researchers leading the project hope to “clarify its potential protective and risk effects to support optimization and personalization of treatment protocols.”
But the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that puberty blockers are not innocuous for gender-confused children, and has published several orders going after hospitals and doctors who promote 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.”
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