The Washington Post reports tonight on a new, depressing lurch downward in the overall progress of the Trump administration, as analysts for the Centers For Disease Control report that they’ve been handed an apparently ideologically mandated list of forbidden words that they’re no longer allowed to use as part of an upcoming budget proposal, a list that includes words like “transgender” and “fetus.”
The anonymous analyst who talked to the Post expressed outrage at the mandate from on-high, which seems specifically designed to block out certain avenues of research—like, say, AIDS research into transgender populations—from receiving any form of federal funding. The Post article suggests that this is just one of several attempts by the administration to politically police the Department Of Health And Human Services, of which the CDC is a part. The Department’s web site has previously removed information—prominent during the Obama era—designed to help LGBTQ citizens get assistance with things like adoption.
Other terms on the forbidden list include “diversity,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and, perhaps most bafflingly of all, “evidence-based” and “science based,” because the last thing we want is our experts on preventing diseases and epidemics going all willy-nilly with the science talk, right? (Instead, they’re encouraged to use phrases like “science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” with said standard presumably being set by Trump himself.)