Five months after U.S. health agencies temporarily removed what is believed to be hundreds of webpages, a federal judge ruled the agencies overstepped the law, according to court documents.
The ruling marked a win for Doctors for America, which represents 27,000 physicians, and other plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against HHS and the Office of Personnel Management.
On Jan. 20, the day President Donald Trump began his second term, he issued an executive order on gender ideology. The order instructed federal agencies to remove all statements “that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.” A Jan. 29 directive from the Office of Personnel Management told agencies to “[t]ake down webpages promoting gender ideology within 48 hours.”
By early February, the CDC and other agencies removed webpages related to gender-based violence, HIV, teenage depression, reproductive care, abortion access, LGBTQ+ issues, health equity, tuberculosis and other health conditions and diseases. Some pages were soon republished with certain words removed.
U.S. Judge John Bates, who would later rule the page removals as unlawful, issued a temporary restraining order Feb. 11, directing the agencies to restore earlier versions of websites that were scrubbed.
On July 3, he rendered the executive order’s directive to wipe the health webpages as void.
“An executive order can do a lot, but it does not absolve agencies of their obligations to follow the law,” Mr. Bates wrote in the court’s opinion. “The defendants acted contrary to law and arbitrarily and capriciously in swiftly enacting and implementing sweeping and poorly thought-through directives that ordered the bulk removal of healthcare resources on which the government had induced substantial and ongoing reliance.”
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