Large parts of the CDC’s website and several important databases were taken down on Friday and Saturday to comply with Trump’s executive orders banning DEI content. Saturday, a message at the top of the CDC’s home page said the website “is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
CDC websites and databases taken offline include the CDC Atlas, the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a CDC website about HIV treatment, and the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. Some of these removals were earlier reported by NBC News. Some of the pages were replaced with messages that read “Page Not Found or Temporarily Unavailable” or “The page you're looking for was not found.” There was widespread uncertainty throughout Friday as to whether a broader takedown across the government would happen.
“Our team’s government affairs firm is advising that as of 5pm today, all U.S. government agency websites will be taken down,” an internal email obtained by 404 Media earlier Friday read. “According to reports, agencies are unable to comply fast enough with President Trump’s EO ordering all government entities to remove all DEI references from their websites, so these websites will be taken offline. There is no word on when they will be made available again.”
At 5pm Friday, however, no widespread, cross-government takedowns happened. Throughout the day Friday and Saturday, however CDC pages continued to disappear. Saturday, a message at the top of the CDC’s website said “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
404 Media has reported on U.S. government pages about gender identity were taken down; that GitHub commits showed the Trump administration scrubbing government web pages in real time; and how archivists are working to save thousands of datasets disappearing from Data.gov.
Some federal contractors and federal employees spent much of Friday afternoon panicking about the deletions, and there was uncertainty about what would be taken offline and how widespread the takedowns would be. A CDC employee that 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about sensitive issues said that they were told by the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer of the Department of Health and Human Services that all employees were told they had to delete their preferred pronouns from their email signatures by 5 PM Friday.
Agencies were also ordered 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,” with a deadline of 5 PM Eastern Friday. Agencies were forced to “send an email to all agency employees announcing that the agency will be complying with Defending Women and this guidance.” Agencies have been ordered to create a report within the next week that includes “a complete list of actions taken in response to this guidance.” The specific executive order is Trump’s “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Defending Women).”
A similar message was posted to Reddit earlier on Friday. “We are being told that the CDC website is scheduled to go down by EOD today. Please share this with your partners and encourage them, as well as you should plan to download any significant information,” it reads.
There have been several efforts to archive data that already existed across the federal government, including the End of Term Archive, a volunteer effort that saved hundreds of terabytes of data before Trump was inaugurated.
