President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services spent six figures paying Drexel University researchers to interview transgender people in India, according to federal records.

Between March 2021 and February 2024, HHS paid out $389,087 to a team of academics at Drexel to perform “quantitative” interviews with 30 transgender men across Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two largest cities. Additionally, the Biden administration provided the researchers with federal funding to distribute online surveys to 300 transgender men living in those cities. The ultimate goals of the publicly-funded research project were to “inform the development and evaluation of an intervention to promote mental health” for transgender people in India and to “impact rapidly evolving transgender health and social policies in India and beyond.”