If you think it sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. When Trump adopted the presidency in 2017, scientists, archivists and librarians at the University of Pennsylvania rushed to save data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NOAA. Another group in Michigan, who also fears the EPA and NOAA websites would lose valuable information, made a similar step. Websites were backed up to the Internet Archive; Large data sets are “in the bag” for safe custody.
At the time, the researchers were not sure that the incoming administration would delete any information. It was more like a crazy, one who proved for the time being when the EPA, which was then led by Trump appointment and agency administrator Scott Pruitt, began in April 2017 to remove the climate change information on his website, “to reflect the approach of new leadership.”
Between 2017 and 2021, more than 1400 pages related to climate change on government sites were changed or made less accessible, according to data compiled by the EDGI. It says that Gretchen Ghrke, which leads the EDGI monitoring program, is not “extensive list of changes”, as some changes – such as removing “climate change” from EPA navigation page – is only counted once, but affects several other pages.
“I think there is a lot more awareness about the precarity of federal information after experiencing the first Trump administration,” says Ghrke. “If they look at how the Trump campaign is truly obsessed with Trans people, and knowing the Trump administration’s history of oppression of information, people were and are rightly concerned that the information is at risk.”
That’s why Beccia is worried. Data sets like those in the YRBs are few and far in between and losing them, can be disastrous for those who want to know about the health and well-being of trans-youth in America.
Although the YRBS currently lives on the CDC’s website, it has briefly disappeared, along with data on the Food and Drug Administration and websites for Department of Health and Human Services, earlier this year after an order of the Office or Personnel Management that it was scrubbed to comply with Trump’s executive orders.
The information returned in mid -February when US district judge John Bates, who responds to a lawsuit of Doctors for America, granted a temporary restriction order and the site was reinstated. A disclaimer at the top of the YRBS page now says, “Any information on this page that promotes genital ideology is exceptionally inaccurate,” and adds “this page does not reflect the biological reality, and the administration and this department reject it.”
Tazlina Mannix worked for the JRBS program in Alaska from 2015 to 2023, both as recording coordinator and data manager. She notes that even if the CDC keeps the data online, disclaimer as the one on the site now makes it more difficult for researchers to do their job. The collection of public health data relies on relationships with people in health departments and school districts. If you give these people any reason to hesitate, you can ‘set back to zero’, she says. “When I first saw [that disclaimer]I was so terrified. The language is so extreme, and it is also just wrong. “