President-elect Trump is promising more government efficiency – but is money really being wasted on cats on treadmills?
Musk, the world’s richest person, amplified posts on his X platform that said the United States government funded research on “transgender” monkeys, cats on treadmills and “alcoholic rats” sprayed with bobcat urine.
“Some of this stuff is not merely a waste of money, but outright evil,” Musk wrote on November 13.
“Your tax dollars at ‘work’,” Musk said on November 12 with a laughing emoji with tears.
Musk said he wants the federal government to cut “at least $2 trillion”, or almost 30 percent of what the US government spent in 2024. Trump didn’t specify a target amount for the group led by Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, but he set July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as a deadline for identifying cuts. The department can make recommendations, but Congress has the ultimate power on spending decisions.
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Many federal research projects Musk cited overlap with findings in annual “Festivus” reports about government spending by Republican US Senator Rand Paul, who said Musk and Ramaswamy can use his reports as “inspiration”.
Some projects stretch back decades. For example, one list on X compiled by Dillon Loomis, host of the YouTube show Electrified, called out Department of Agriculture credit card spending on “concert tickets, tattoos, lingerie and car payments”. This came from a 2003 government audit.
Musk boosted another X post by The Redheaded Libertarian that said the government spent $4.5m “to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine” in 2020.
Medical research has long been a bipartisan target for criticism, Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense said.
“Whether tequila makes fish angry, shrimp on a treadmill are two projects that come to mind,” Sewell said. “You comb through the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and other agencies, and there are a lot of weird-sounding studies – at least superficially.”
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Many complaints exclude the problems the research is trying to address, which might change how people perceive its value. In the case of these new examples Musk cited, the money went largely to research and academic institutions over several years to study animals to solve health problems in humans.
