Employees at several federal agencies were ordered Friday to remove their pronouns from any email signatures and grant applications, according to internal memos obtained by ABC News.
The memos cited two of President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive orders, both of which sought to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government.
One of the executive orders described DEI initiatives in the federal government as “illegal and immoral” and “radical and wasteful.”
Of course, this isn’t true, and it’s clear that DEI is becoming a GOP scapegoat that’s fundamentally built on bigotry. Indeed, if anyone in the public or private sector screws up, Trump’s first instinct has been to blame DEIa bizarre angle built on the apparent assumption that LGBTQ+ people, women, and people of color can’t be trusted.
According to ABC News, a memo sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed workers to modify their email signatures by 5 p.m. ET on Friday.
According to Gizmodowhich received a photo of the CDC email, staffers must also scrub certain phrases from the CDC website, including “pregnant people” (which now must read “pregnant women”) and “breastfeeding people” (which now must refer to breastfeeding “mothers” or “women”). Other terms such as “DEI,” “environmental justice,” “LGBT,” and “transgender” must be removed from the site entirely.
Agency leaders must also “send an email to all agency employees announcing that the agency will be complying with” the federal order.
Some of these changes are already underway. Data from a federal survey on youth behavioral habits, including their gender identity and sexual orientation, has been removed from the CDC website.
“Everyone I know in public health and science more broadly is freaking out right now,” a researcher and instructor told STAT News.
ABC News confirmed that these instructions were also sent to workers at the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy. Notably, DOT workers received the email on Thursday, the same day they were monitoring the fallout of the first major commercial plane crash in the United States in 16 years.
“In my decade-plus years at CDC, I’ve never been told what I can and can’t put in my email signature,” an anonymous employee told ABC News.
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