Data from an expansive federal survey on youth behavioral habits, including their sexual orientation and gender identity, have been removed from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which maintains the data.
The CDC and other federal agencies appeared to be racing to meet a Friday afternoon deadline to remove “gender ideology” from their websites, in accordance with a memo from the Office of Personnel Management. NBC News reported that all the CDC’s HIV pages were removed, but the main page appeared to have been restored later.
Many researchers say that without the survey results from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, one of the largest nationally representative such surveys, they will be left in the lurch, particularly when it comes to certain information on LGBTQ+ populations.
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“I spent all morning frantically downloading YRBS data. I can’t believe this is all happening,” Ariel Beccia, a researcher and instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on eating disorders in LGBTQ+ populations, wrote in an email. Later in the morning, the data disappeared. Every other year, the YRBS survey tracks teen habits like smoking and drinking, eating, exercising, sexual behavior, and more.
“Everyone I know in public health and science more broadly is freaking out right now,” she added in an interview.
The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index — a dataset designed to track how susceptible county-level areas are to disaster — was also down. Another CDC page on “Efforts to Address Racism as a Fundamental Driver of Health Disparities,” last publicly archived on Tuesday, was also down. On the U.S. Census website, some previously published pages describing sexual orientation and gender identity are missing. (Search results on keywords such as “sexual orientation” still produced results as of midday Friday.)
The U.S. Census Bureau did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The CDC referred questions to HHS, and HHS did not immediately reply.
The Trump administration has removed a number of agency webpages including program information and spending data since taking office, including at health and science agencies. Researchers anticipate that the deletion of the data that include sexual orientation and gender identity information are just the first losses in a larger effort by the administration to remove data that acknowledge gender diversity.
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Trump previously signed an executive order aimed at cutting federal support for gender transitions for people under age 19.
On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to department heads directing them to “withdraw any final or pending documents, directives, orders, regulations, materials” and more that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” Federal employees have been told to remove their pronouns from their email signatures by the end of the day Friday, ABC News has reported.
“It feels like they’re trying to will us out of existence,” said Nathaniel Tran, a researcher and assistant professor of health policy at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “If the federal government says we’re not allowed to collect this data anymore for the next four years, that creates a pretty significant gap in our data system.”