Trump Admin Restores Deleted Webpages With Bogus Label

“Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate,” reads a new disclaimer at the top of newly restored federal sites that contain objective health information.

By Kylie Cheung | February 14, 2025 | 4:47pm

Photo: Getty Images Politics

Trump Admin Restores Deleted Webpages With Bogus Label

On Tuesday, a federal judge directed the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration to restore webpages the Trump administration deleted on January 31. The order comes as part of a temporary restraining order requiring the pages to return by Friday at 11:59 p.m. et, pending an official ruling. The webpages were deleted following an executive order signed by Trump on day one, directing federal agencies to remove “all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”—that is, anything that acknowledges trans people’s existence—from their websites.

On January 31, key webpages with objective health information, including at least one CDC webpage on sexual violence, went dark; some returned a few days later with an ominous label up top that stated the page is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s executive orders.” And more pages returned this week after the Tuesday court order—but with an even worse disclaimer up top, flagged by 404 Media on Friday:

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Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of February 14, 2025 at 11:59 p.m. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate, and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.

This disclaimer seems to directly violate the court order, which directs the Trump administration to restore the webpages in question “to their versions as of January 30, 2025.” That… is not the case at all. 404 Media reports that a page on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s website linking to a survey on behavioral health and substance abuse among LGBTQ youth contains the above disclaimer. As does the FDA’s June 2024 “guidance document” for “Diversity Action Plans to Improve Enrollment of Participants from Underrepresented Populations in Clinical Studies,” and a January 2025 guidance document for the “Study of Sex Differences in the Clinical Evaluation of Medical Products.”

Every web page ordered restored by the court that features anything related to gender now contains this notice.

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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) February 14, 2025 at 1:10 PM

I cannot stress enough that we are not only living in the cruelest timeline possible but also the dumbest one. None of this is even vaguely ideological. The world’s most bigoted, illiterate adults have deemed any words they don’t understand—which are a lot of fucking words!—to be “gender ideology,” and that’s now grounds to create all kinds of barriers for scientists to do life-saving work, or disseminate life-saving information. It goes without saying that LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities will be most harmed.

The Justice Department and Public Citizen Litigation Group, which brought forth the case to restore deleted webpages, said in a joint statement on Thursday that the Trump administration has provided a list of the restored webpages, but noted that reproductiverights.gov—a know your rights resource helping residents of abortion-banned states navigate abortion access—has not been restored. “Defendants have objected to restoring the website ‘reproductiverights.gov.’ Plaintiff’s counsel is conferring with their client,” the joint statement says.

In addition to reproductiverights.gov going dark, the Health and Human Services Department also scrubbed its website for any useful mentions of “abortion” via its search engine, while the CDC’s website redirects “abortion” searches to “adoption,” which are entirely different things.

It bears repeating: People will die, or otherwise be seriously harmed, by not being able to access vital health information, or if health care workers aren’t able to report key data. This is the price the administration wants us to pay for its vile and wildly stupid culture war.