THOUGHT CONTROL, TRUMP-STYLE
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told not to use the terms “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based” in budget documents they are producing, The Washington Post reported last week.
Environmental Protection Agency contractors had done opposition research for the Republican Party and submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for emails of agency employees suspected of being critical of the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt.
They are just two recent examples of this administration’s continuing effort to mute, censor and spy on employees in federal agencies whose words or views don’t sync with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
This began as Trump took office, when two Interior Department retweets, one depicting his lackluster inauguration crowds and one noting the disappearance of policy material from the White House website, vanished from the department’s Twitter feed.
The same month, word went out to federal agencies that department social media content and “outward facing” communications should halt, pending reviews from on high. Content for LGBTQ communities was removed from White House and State Department websites. References to the threats posed by climate change were deleted from the White House website, along with Interior’s.
In March, the administration stripped questions about sexual orientation and gender identity from the Department of Health and Human Services’ national survey of older Americans, an annual study that helps determine how to allocate federal funding to groups that aid elderly people. In April, the EPA deleted its website’s climate section, saying that after a review the site would be “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.”
In August, it was reported that staff members at the Department of Agriculture had been given a list of replacements for the phrases “climate change,” “reduce greenhouse gases” and “sequester carbon.” In September, news emerged that a political appointee at the EPA was striking the words “climate change,” which he referred to as the “double C-word,” from grant solicitations.
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, the EPA has targeted by name journalists whose coverage is critical of the agency, at one point issuing a news release calling a factually accurate Associated Press report of damage to Texas Superfund sites after Hurricane Harvey “an attempt to mislead Americans.”
Looking at nearly a year’s worth of ideological word changes, censorship of government communications and now efforts to dig up dirt on employees who object to “the approach of new leadership,” most Americans would reach a different conclusion on just who’s misleading whom.