Rewriting Government Websites
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 5, 2025
Though I seldom roam through government websites seeking advice on how to live my life, tons of scientists, researchers, statisticians and groups that look to advance legislation to improve our lot do.
With the Trump administration ordering federal agencies to wipe mentions of any references to programs and research affecting “diversity and inclusion” or “gender identity,” anything dealing with climate change and alternative energy sources, thousands of pages have been taken down from the web and erased. In all, the eliminated pages are a tiny fraction of what the government posts, but since it has made a point of using an official eraser, we ought to know what’s gone.
The agencies have eliminated lots of material that most of us likely would be seen as somewhere between benign and dull, but that serve as libraries of scientific information for researchers and professionals from everything from medicine to hate crimes to veterans’ care. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories
The blunt force dictates to hastily remove topics that Donald Trump prefers not to see on these sites is happening in a way that is crude and overstated. It is bringing a research sledgehammer to a job requiring an editing pen, if the job needs doing at all. Indeed, it seems a descriptor for the wider Trump flood of executive orders that bring challenges of protocol or law, unintended consequences and, as with the on-off tariffs, questions about whether there were specific,, measurable goals before the actions were ordered.
Before the purge, The New York Times assembled a database of most-used government pages and was able to track that about 8,000 have been eliminated in a week, including from the Justice Department, the Education Department, the IRS, with no obvious reference to diversity issues, the announced target of the order.
It seems yet one more example of vaguely written orders from the White House leading to outsized, unrestrained desire to comply. As a country, it is hard to see how eliminating guidelines on the use of HIV tests or research about trans medicines from the Centers for Disease Control helps make us a safer country.
Rather, it seems to guarantee that we believe that by hiding information that guides our best and brightest minds in medicine, for example, that the U.S. has no one whose struggles with gender identity even exists. We are confusing plain old information for propaganda that gender struggles, for example, are a good thing for Americans to experience.
CDC as a Focus
Under guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, the CDC eliminated about 3,000 web pages that apparently touched on gender identity and equity. Those included pages about HIV testing and medication, on vaccines recommended by the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee for transgender or gender-diverse patients or surveys of youth risk studies.
According to The Washington Post, removed or edited materials included extensive data sets used by researchers globally. An example was a biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey to assess the health behaviors of high school students and providing data about the scope of youth mental health problems, suicide and drug use. CDC webpages offering guidelines for prescribing and using pre-exposure prophylactic drugs — medication used to prevent HIV infections — have also been removed, the Post said.
The Times found that eliminated pages also reflected a thousand research articles about preventing chronic disease, information about Alzheimer’s warning signs, overdose prevention training and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people — adding that the use of the phrase “pregnant people” could have contributed to its removal.
The order for editing and removal work gave two days end “all agency programs that use taxpayer money to promote or reflect gender ideology.” That memo said agencies need to “take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.”
The news outlet checked and could not find 2,200 studies, papers or guidance pages that referred to trans individuals or 490 citing LGBTQ more broadly, Last week, the CDC housed 6,000 documents with the word “equity.” Many of the records concern prevention of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or studies of whether individuals in various communities receive health care.
Other Trump orders froze external communications at the CDC and other health agencies, citing the need to review the agencies’ public messaging. Among other things, that killed a weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceuticals use.
Among government health agencies, some web references were edited to say male and female, including at the National Institutes for Health; others eliminated whole pages. Agency staff members were given a list of about 20 words and phrases to be used as a “guide,” according to a screenshot shared by one employee.
Using key words to search for offense seems a mainstay in MAGA World. It is exactly what Florida state officials are doing to “review” college courses that mention similar gender-identity terms. State officials in Texas and Virginia have used key term searches to seek out Latin-sounding names to identify and kick voters from registration rolls. It is a notoriously ineffectual tool for considered searches for cleanup because it does not account for context.
Other Agencies
The Times analysis showed that the 8,000 removed web pages were much broader in execution.
More than 3,000 pages were taken down by the Census Bureau, most are articles reflecting research and methodology, data policies and data sets. Justice removed 1,000 pages that included an article on teenage dating violence, grants that to combat hate crimes, and state-level hate crime data. Some 200 pages about Head Start programs with advice on helping families set routines and videos about post-partum depression were taken down.
The FDA removed more than 60 regulatory guidelines on topics such as diversity in clinical trials and addiction and abuse in drug trials. The IRS dropped pages with a transcript on “Here’s how to avoid I.R.S. penalties and interest.” The Interior Department lost web pages about environmental policies, the Department of Veterans Affairs erased pages on LGBTQ veteran care, The list goes on.
Amid all the talk and testimony about transparency about this administration, we’re supposed to simply accept the version of what immigration, health or the economy is that the government chooses to report. Hmm.
— -
Advancing RFK and Gabbard
Despite a ton of testimony and history that showed clear cases to kill confirmations, Republican senators voted yesterday to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence — and presumably toward confirmation by the full Senate. The politics of straight-party line voting reflected a desire to advance Donald Trump’s picks, not a statement that these were the best people in the country for the job.
But it should make us wonder what they possibly could have said that would be publicly persuasive of their disqualifications.
Along with promoting better eating habits, Kennedy has acknowledged personal and professional conflicts, an antipathy for accepted science, norms and the people who do them, a history of anti-vaccine advocacy, and an obvious lack of understanding of the health agencies. Gabbard who has attacked U.S. intelligence agencies, refused to answer questions directly about why she met with American enemies, her repeated lean towards Russia, or even whether — as demanded by the Republican side of the committee — whether convicted spy Edward Snowden should be regarded as treasonous.
What would they have to have said for one Republican senator to say no?
##