Various pages from government websites, including public data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have disappeared under President Trump's orders. What on earth has disappeared?

The US government is undergoing various reforms under President Donald Trump, who took office on January 20, 2025, and many of the government's official websites have been modified or deleted. It has been reported that pages are disappearing one after another from the official websites of government organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC Is Altering Data to Follow Trump's DEI Order - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/01/cdc-dei-scientific-data/681531/

Thousands of US Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/upshot/trump-government-websites-missing-pages.html

On the night of January 31, 2025, an urgent warning was sent out among scientists to 'immediately download the data from the CDC website.' Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, reported that she stayed up until 2 a.m. saving the data.

As expected, the CDC subsequently lost a lot of data from its website, including data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's social vulnerability indicators, environmental justice indicators, and a landing page for HIV data. It also restricted access to nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases, and tuberculosis.

According to an analysis by the American daily newspaper The New York Times, the deleted pages also cover the following institutions:

Over 180 pages from the Department of Justice, including state-level hate crimes data
Approximately 150 pages from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
- Over 100 pages from the Food and Drug Administration
Approximately 50 research papers from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information
・25+ pages from the Internal Revenue Service
-Three pages from the Department of Veterans Affairs (on LGBTQ veteran care, minority veteran care, and equity in the Louisiana health care system)

These changes build on a Trump Administration directive ordering the end of programs and the withdrawal of related documentation that promote 'gender ideology,' specifically targeting terms such as 'pregnant people,' 'transgender,' 'binary,' 'non-binary,' 'gender,' and 'assigned at birth.'

Experts are concerned that this change will have a significant impact on research and medical care, and Brown University epidemiologist Katie Biello has warned that it will make it more difficult to track the health of certain demographic groups. For example, she has highlighted the importance of medical interventions that take into account demographic differences, such as 'gay men have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases but lower rates of obesity' and 'transgender women have higher rates of HIV infection but lower rates of prostate cancer.'

Additionally, removing this data could have implications for government budget allocations: concerns have been raised that the lack of data showing concentrations of health problems in certain communities could be used as a basis for cutting aid to those communities.

The Atlantic warns that the essential purpose of public health data is to identify the places and people most in need of intervention, and that altering or deleting this data will leave a distorted picture of reality. In particular, the report points out the danger that the loss of accuracy and completeness of data will make it difficult to mount an effective public health response and prevent the health needs of specific communities from being properly identified.

The New York Times also emphasized that although the pages removed represent only 0.1% of all government domains, the change is 'much more extensive' than previous administrations. It also expressed serious concerns that some pages may be reinstated later, making it difficult to accurately measure the extent of the actual impact.

In addition, the social news site Hacker News points out that 'removing such records from the public internet would be considered a violation of the Open Data Act of 2018.'