The Empire Strikes Back: justice Orders CDC, FDA, And another Agencies To reconstruct Woke Webpages

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered U.S. health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restore data and webpages that were taken down in recent days to comply with a Trump administration order on gender ideology and diversity rules.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta on April 23, 2020. Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images

Numerous webpages operated by the CDC were removed after President Donald Trump took office, a spokesperson confirmed to The Epoch Times last week. Other webpages belonging to the FDA and other agencies operated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were taken down as well, a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration said.

U.S. District Judge John Bates, with the federal court in Washington, on Tuesday issued a temporary order in favor of Doctors for America (DFA), an advocacy group that filed a lawsuit. He agreed with the group’s arguments that the removal of the pages appeared to violate a provision that mandates federal agencies to provide notice before they end information portals and products.

“This opinion has documented the harm DFA members have suffered and will continue to suffer absent intervention, but the harm extends beyond them,” Bates wrote in the order.

He said the organization was able to also supply “declarations from doctors around the country who, although not DFA members themselves, are representative of the widespread disruption that defendants’ abrupt removal of these critical healthcare materials has caused.”

Pages that were removed in recent days to comply with Trump administration orders include ones for Health Disparities Among LQBTQ Youth, Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of Vaccine for Mpox Prevention, Fast Facts: HIV and Transgender People, HIV data pages, the page for the U.S. global HIV program called PEPFAR, and others.

A CDC page with the title “Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People” was renamed “Safer Food Choices for Pregnant Women.” When the previous version of the CDC page is accessed, it displays a message saying it was moved to the one referencing women.

At the same time, the CDC displays a message on all of its webpages that reads: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.“

Doctors of America argued in its complaint that the “removal of the webpages and datasets creates a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and engaging with patients.”

The group, which filed a lawsuit against the HHS, CDC, FDA, and Office of Personnel Management, also alleged that the removal of datasets “deprives researchers of access to information that is necessary for treating patients, for developing clinical studies that produce results that accurately reflect the effects treatments.”

After being sworn into office on Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the federal government, as well as an executive order to end gender ideology in the government. The OPM issued a memo on Jan. 21, meanwhile, that sought to shut down agency DEI offices and asked federal workers to inform the OPM on whether there were efforts to intentionally obscure those offices to prevent them from being shuttered.

In his order on gender ideology, Trump declared that it is now “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” Separately, Trump signed a directive last month to prohibit “pediatric transgender surgeries or hormone treatments” as well as “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children.

[ZH: we give the last word to Jeffrey Tucker, who wrote on X:

„I’ve had plenty of friends who are against democracy. I get it. It’s an implausible claim that people can rule themselves and I’m truly open to the arguments.

My own preference is for radical decentralization and anarchism ultimately: probably this is the only true form of democracy.

That said, so long as we are sloganeering about democracy, should we not actually try it? For example, should not the elected leaders and their hires have access to the accounting books?

How in the world does anyone think that having an unelected and unmonitored elite with permanent positions oversee the nation’s accounting, with protection from federal judges, is a good system of government?”

Extremely urgent https://t.co/IfK0gx6mJD

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 11, 2025