Trump administration purges websites across federal health agencies

Webpages at the CDC and other health agencies went down on Friday. (Will Stone/NPR)

At the direction of the Trump administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies are purging its websites of information and data on a broad array of topics — from adolescent health to LGBTQ+ rights to HIV.

Several webpages from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with references to LGBTQ+ health were no longer available. A page from the HHS Office for Civil Rights outlining the rights of LGBTQ+ people in health care settings was also gone as of Friday. The website of the National Institutes of Health’s Office for Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office disappeared. (Most of these pages could still be viewed through the Internet Archive.)

The changes at the CDC and NIH are examples of a broad push by the Trump administration on gender issues under an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” That order directs agencies throughout the government to stop offering “gender identity” as a choice on government forms and to end funding of “gender ideology.”