CDC data site briefly went dark as agency complies with Trump ‘gender ideology’ order
A government webpage that houses data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was taken down Friday night in an effort to comply with an order from President Donald Trump.
The website that earlier in the day had 1,419 results to browse, per a Wayback Machine capture, was replaced with a note that said “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply with” Trump’s executive order (EO 14168) on “gender ideology” and the Office of Personnel Management’s memo to agencies on carrying that order out.
“The website will resume operations once in compliance,” the CDC page read.
As of Saturday, that website was back up with a new banner across the top of the page that read “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
Other CDC data pages — such as those for HIV data — were still unavailable as of Saturday, but they didn’t have the same messages displayed on the data.cdc.gov page.
Trump’s order, which was among his day-one actions, sought to rid the federal government of “gender ideology,” which it defines as including “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.” As part of those efforts, the directive defined men and women as the two options for “sex” and directed the term “gender” to be replaced with “sex” in federal policies and documents.
OPM’s Jan. 29 memo then instructed agencies to “take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.” It gave agencies until Friday at 5 p.m. to comply.
In addition to CDC’s data, the Census.gov website also went dark Friday, though it was back online later that night. FedScoop reached out to the Census Bureau and the White House about the reason for that shutdown, but neither immediately responded to requests for comment.
In an emailed response to FedScoop’s questions about why the CDC and Census websites were down and what the consequences were if agencies didn’t comply, an Office of Personnel Management spokesperson said the agency doesn’t “dictate how agencies handle scrubbing their websites.”
“If they don’t comply with the date we sent in guidance, further conversations will need to take place in order to ensure we implement this important effort,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Prior to the CDC data website being taken down Friday, it appeared that results were being removed. A FedScoop capture of the page to browse data showed 50 results fewer than the total on the Wayback Machine’s capture from earlier in the day.
On Saturday, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s website, USAID.gov, was also offline. That change comes after the Trump administration paused all foreign assistance through USAID, as well as the State Department, while that funding is reviewed for efficiency and alignment with its “America First” agenda.
This story was updated on Feb. 1 to reflect the CDC data site coming back online.
