Staff at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent Thursday figuring out how to comply with a memo sent out to federal agencies from the Office of Personnel Management demanding an end to anything that promotes “gender ideology.” The agency is planning to scrub CDC materials of forbidden words, part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on LGBT people, especially trans Americans. The goal is clearly to inflict as much pain as possible on vulnerable communities, and it’s working.
OPM issued a memo Wednesday to federal agencies titled “Initial Guidance Regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women,” which was posted online by the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. The memo, which was also sent to staff at the CDC, references an executive order issued by Trump that rather perversely claims to protect women. Phrases like “gender ideology” and “DEI” have been transformed into code words for anything Trump’s supporters don’t like, and they’re working on purging the government of that and so much more.
The memo, dated Jan. 29, 2025, calls for a review of all programs, contracts, and grants at agencies like the CDC that involve “gender ideology” and orders anyone working on such programs to be placed on paid administrative leave. The memo also calls for the withdrawal of any documents and communications that “inculcate or promote gender ideology,” including on public-facing websites and social media accounts. It also directs personnel to “review agency email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns.”
A separate email sent to CDC staff on Friday read, “Staff are being asked to alter signature blocks by 5 p.m. ET today … Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures,” according to a photo of the email shared with Gizmodo.
An employee at the CDC spoke with Gizmodo about the changes, which they described as “creepy” and “unprecedented,” even compared to Trump’s first term from 2017-2021. The employee, who wished to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said there was now an “aggressive tone behind everything.”
When reached for comment, the CDC referred questions to the Department of Health and Human Services, which did not respond. An email address listed on the memo, [email protected], also did not reply to our request for comment on Thursday.
The exact changes demanded to things like the CDC website were not spelled out in the memo, and it’s unclear who is guiding this process through the chain of command. The edict to abolish anything associated with “DEI” has clearly come from the top; on Thursday, Trump baselessly blamed diversity in hiring for the recent plane crash in Washington D.C. that killed 67 people. But it’s unclear who’s making decisions on how these policies should be implemented.
“You don’t even know who’s making these decisions. There’s a lot of anonymity,” the CDC employee told Gizmodo. “Every day there’s a new surprise. We don’t know what exactly the endpoint is going to be. Even before this, we were told to stop communicating altogether, even send emails to anyone outside CDC we wouldn’t normally work with.”
Banned phrases that must be scrubbed from the CDC website and communications include “pregnant people,” which now must read “pregnant women,” as well as “breastfeeding people,” which now must refer to breastfeeding “women” or “mothers.” References to the word “gender” need to be replaced by “sex,” as the OPM memo explicitly orders. Other words need to be removed entirely, according to the CDC employee, including “transgender,” “DEI,” “LGBT,” and “environmental justice.”
There’s a chill inside CDC, according to the staffer, though they concede it’s entirely possible that some staffers agree with the changes. Most people, however, seem on edge.
“I feel like already there’s a lot of self-censorship,” said the CDC employee. “I feel like this will have effects beyond any specific memo. People are really walking on eggshells about what they say.”
Aside from the changes to messaging, there are also changes at the agency that are impacting the way that people do their jobs. There’s a pause on all travel, and nobody can give presentations. Perhaps most disturbing, CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report isn’t being published anymore. That’s holding up a lot of research from getting out, including vital new bird flu studies, according to KFF Health News.
“There’s no timeline. No one ever said we anticipate this to take two weeks or three weeks. It’s an open-ended pause,” the CDC worker said. “This is unprecedented in the sense that they’re very heavy-handed. They came in with a specific plan to control the messaging.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, doesn’t have a permanent leader right now, something that could change quickly if Trump’s nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed. Kennedy faced two rounds of questions in Senate hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the anti-vaxxer and fringe conspiracy theorist was welcomed by some of the dumbest politicians America has ever produced. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, for instance, bragged on Wednesday that his granddaughter wasn’t getting vaccinated against anything because “my son and his wife have done their research about vaccines.”
That kind of rhetoric makes the CDC employee Gizmodo spoke with uncomfortable, saying of Kennedy, “a lot of what he’s saying scares me,” adding that it’s “very disappointing to see someone who doesn’t believe in well-established scientific consensus.”
Some people on social media have already noticed the changes, sharing Wayback Machine images showing that research about transgender youths’ experiences in school has already been removed from the CDC website.
