The Trump administration on Friday appeared to take down data and information from a variety of government websites, with a focus on information related to gender diversity, sexual health and climate change. In some cases entire websites disappeared. Others remained online, but had critical information missing.
The changes to government websites, as well as the blockages in the flow of grant money the administration announced earlier this week, appeared part of a whole-of-government effort to erase mention of topics deemed incompatible with President Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to marginalize transgender people and pushing back against material purportedly associated with “DEIA,” or diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, initiatives.
Among the many affected websites Friday: The U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage, which appeared to be experiencing intermittent outages. Compared to archived versions, the National Institutes of Health Office on Research and Women’s Health appeared significantly pared down, as was the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions’ Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which returned an error when accessed Friday evening. NPR noted the program is “the nation’s largest monitoring program on health-related behaviors among high schoolers.”
The Bureau of Prisons website now displays only male and female populations. It used to include data on the number of trans people in custody, according to an archived version.
Numerous webpages for the CDC’s HIV prevention division, especially those about efforts to address health disparities among Black, Latino and transgender communities, were not online. By Friday, the main webpage for HIV, HIV data, details about “Ending the HIV Epidemic,” and information on PrEP, the preventive drug used to reduce the risk, were also not available. Other CDC sites about LGBTQ youth, including pages focused on risks of suicide among LGBTQ children, school safety, and health disparities were all still inaccessible as of Friday night.
Similarly, Target HIV, a website that provides technical assistance and training resources to agencies and medical facilities that receive federal funding from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program — which is run by HHS to provide treatment to low-income people living with HIV — was “under maintenance.”
The deletions are part of a wider ideological purge undertaken by the Trump administration and fulfill some of the policy promises outlined in Project 2025.
Over the last week Trump signed several executive orders barring federally funded hospitals and clinics from providing gender health care to trans people younger than 19; requiring the promotion of “patriotic education” while limiting any teaching of any material that includes “gender ideology,” broadly defined; and redefining “sex” to exclude transgender people from legal recognition. Already, Trump’s directives have halted coverage of gender-affirming for youth on federal insurance plans.
Government agencies did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment Friday, making it impossible to confirm whether any or all of these changes were intentional — and, if so, who ordered them and why, or when some of the information might come back online.
However, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services told changes to its website were “made in accordance with” recent executive orders from the Trump administration prohibiting DEI content and official recognition of — or references to — trans Americans.
Some of the efforts appeared connected to a Wednesday memo from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources hub and a key nexus for political activity by the Trump administration. Reuters reported Friday that aides of Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s “government efficiency” cheerleader, had locked career staff out of computer systems containing millions’ of federal employees personal data.
Among other things, the memo instructed departments to terminate any programs, contracts or grants that “promote or inculcate gender ideology,” and to stop any pending plans and take down outward-facing communications that did the same. The document demanded the actions be taken by Friday at 5 p.m. ET., and directed questions to the email address “[email protected].”
CNN reported on one unnamed senior health official who said staff were warned of severe consequences for violating the memo. The same official said websites were taken down in order to comply with the memo, and that “in the process, large swaths of data and science will be unavailable for an undetermined period.”
“Regardless of your comfort with the idea of trans people, you should be terrified that the government is purging truth and science to fit an ideology, because what’s next?” the official added, CNN reported.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, employees were told that any pronouns in email signatures “must be removed,” according to a memo obtained by HuffPost.
Outside contractors working with one agency were told to terminate any government contracts that “promote or inculcate gender ideology” and included a list of words including “gender, transgender, inclusivity, nonbinary” and “they/them” pronouns, according to a separate email obtained by HuffPost.
The decision to take down the website for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — which measures things like tobacco use and sexual behavior — was made in order to comply with Trump’s “Defending Women” executive order, an unnamed person familiar with the matter told NPR.
The impact of the memo already appears to have stretched beyond Washington. A Kentucky-based health department that relies on millions of dollars in federal grants to fund their health equity programs received a letter this week to terminate all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, according to material obtained by HuffPost.
The crackdown also extended to government-funded research: Science reported Thursday that the National Science Foundation had frozen previously-promised funding to an unknown number of its thousands of grant recipients, searching for research work deemed in violation of Trump’s new rules against “woke gender ideology,” diversity efforts and similar edicts.
NSF officials hadn’t provided any indication of how long the review would take, leaving investigators “wondering how to meet payrolls and buy and maintain essential equipment and supplies,” according to the report.
Among the projects threatened by the funding freeze were projects as apolitical as an earthquake monitoring system, the publication reported separately.
The outages appeared to potentially extend to several of Trump’s political priorities: At the USDA, for example, an internal email ordered employees to delete landing pages related to climate change, Politico reported Friday. While some pages remained active, others, like the department’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities page, “appeared mothballed,” the website reported.
Asked about talk that government websites would be shut down Friday evening to “scrub them of DEI content,” Trump didn’t confirm the reports directly, but said it “doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.
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“DEI would have ruined our country, and now it’s dead, I think it’s dead. So if they want to scrub the websites, that’s okay with me.”