CDC Purging Its Website After Trump Orders

The CDC has begun removing from its website words and pages relating to diversity, gender identity, or LGBTQ issues, according to several sources.

“From a journalist friend: Just spreading the word,” wrote Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, on Bluesky. “The CDC is purging data, so people should archive their favorite CDC datasets today, namely ones around race/ethnic diversity, LGBTQ, and reproductive health. Also, health data involving climate. The youth risk behavior survey has already gone down.”

It was unclear whether the pages were being permanently deleted or just removed from public view, but a quick search showed the following pages have all gone missing and return a note indicating the “page you’re looking for was not found”:

In addition, tools to estimate and reduce the risk of HIV were also down at the time of writing, as was a page on CDC’s efforts to address racism as a driver of health disparities.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) called the removal of the pages “dangerous.”

“The removal of HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies is deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks,” said IDSA President Tina Tan, MD, and HIVMA Chair Colleen Kelley, MD, MPH, in a statement.

“Access to this information is crucial for infectious diseases and HIV healthcare professionals who care for people with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community and is critical to efforts to end the HIV epidemic. This is especially important as diseases such as HIV, mpox, sexually transmitted infections, and other illnesses threaten public health and impact the entire population,” they continued. “Timely and accurate information from the CDC guides clinical practice and policies, which are essential for controlling infections and safeguarding health.”

The CDC appeared to be acting in response to a Jan. 29 memo to all agency and department heads government-wide from Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. That memo, posted by the Chief Human Capital Officers Council and reported by Gizmodo, was entitled, “Initial Guidance Regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women.”

The memo, in turn, referred to an executive order signed by President Trump on Jan. 20, his first day in office, which states that “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”

The order continues, “My administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male … Under my direction, the executive branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality.”

The order directs all federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the federal funding of gender ideology.”

Ezell’s Jan. 29 memo instructed federal agencies to “Review all agency programs, contracts, and grants, and terminate any that promote or inculcate gender ideology” and to “Take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology,” as well as to “Review agency email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns.”

The memo also instructs employees to “Review all agency forms that require entry of an individual’s sex and ensure that all list male or female only, and not gender identity. Remove requests for ‘gender’ and substitute requests for ‘sex.'”

The Gizmodo article noted that “Banned phrases that must be scrubbed from the CDC website and communications include ‘pregnant people,’ which now must read ‘pregnant women,’ as well as ‘breastfeeding people,’ which now must refer to breastfeeding ‘women’ or ‘mothers’ … Other words need to be removed entirely, according to [a] CDC employee, including ‘transgender,’ ‘DEI,’ ‘LGBT,’ and ‘environmental justice.'”

Please enable JavaScript to view the

comments powered by Disqus.