Law be damned, Trump asserts unilateral control over executive branch, federal service (3 Viewers)

RobF said:

This is apparently happening, https://faa.gov/ is down now.

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The www. Helps

Modern day book burning.

There’s an entire list online of government sites that have been taken down. Lots of data sites have just disappeared. Data that the public paid for, hidden from us.

From The Atlantic :

“Last night, scientists began to hear cryptic and foreboding warnings from colleagues: Go to the CDC website, and download your data now. They were all telling one another the same thing: Data on the website were about to disappear, or be altered, to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility. “I was up until 2 a.m.,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan who relies on the CDC’s data to track viral outbreaks, told me. She archived whatever she could.

What they feared quickly came to pass. Already, content from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which includes data from a national survey, has disappeared; so have parts of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index and the Environmental Justice Index. The CDC’s landing page for HIV data has also vanished. And the agency’s AtlasPlus tool, which contains nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is down. Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of “gender” from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with “sex.”“

https://apple.news/AtvacpovxQVayccJYqZAe1g

What the hell is going on

MT15 said:

I think his point is that they can’t be held to that letter, can they? It’s anonymous, vaguely worded and may not be on the up and up. Musk was known to renege famously on severances offered to Twitter employees. And yeah, they are suing him, and it’s dragging into the second year of litigation. Meanwhile nobody got their money.

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It's not an anonymous letter though. It was sent through an official OPM account and is considered official communication from a federal agency. OPM is on the hook for whatever happens as a result of the letter unless the agency rescinds or makes it clear the letter is not official.

I'm well aware of the Musk "Fork in the road" letter sent to Twitter employees.

The federal government is an entirely different animal though. If they think they can stiff federal employees, they'll be in a world of hurt.

superchuck500 said:

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The stupidity of that is amazing.

Sendai said:

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www.faa.gov

The www. Helps

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Yes, while reportedly it went down (e.g. here), it looks like the "federal government websites going dark" thing is more of a taking down chunks of government websites than it is shutting them down. Similarly, census.gov is back up and loading correctly now.

But there seems to be plenty of sections being taken down. E.g. the USDA Forest Service website appears to have had all the sustainability and climate related pages taken down.

So this page should look like this: https://web.archive.org/web/2025011...ability-and-climate/vulnerability-assessments
But it currently just gives "You are not authorized to access this page." The "Sustainability and Climate" section that should be between "Recreation Management" and "Urban Forests" is just gone.

Seems very stupid. Like Devo said, "If you cannot see it, you think it's not there, it doesn't work that way."

More pages seem to have disappeared from the CDC too. E.g. there's data on Long COVID from the Household Pulse Survey. That page should look like this, as it was archived yesterday:


But at the moment, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm returns a 'page not found'.

On Thursday, the Trump administration orderedthe US agriculture department to unpublish its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.

By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.


Several went dark on Friday as agencies scrambled to comply with Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring his administration would recognize only two genders and ordering an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The changes at the forest service website followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications. In the memo, which was reviewed by the Guardian, officials instructed website managers across the agency to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change”. . It also included a Friday deadline to list the mentions in a spreadsheet for further review……

So the way Trump deals with the climate crisis is the same way he dealt with Covid. How did that turn out ?

superchuck500 said:

What the hell is going on

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Are they govt employees? Contractors? I thought Musk was only an advisor. This seems way beyond that.

Optimus Prime said:

On Thursday, the Trump administration orderedthe US agriculture department to unpublish its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.

By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.


Several went dark on Friday as agencies scrambled to comply with Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring his administration would recognize only two genders and ordering an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The changes at the forest service website followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications. In the memo, which was reviewed by the Guardian, officials instructed website managers across the agency to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change”. . It also included a Friday deadline to list the mentions in a spreadsheet for further review……

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis

Forest service website among many sites affected as agencies scramble to comply with president’s orders

www.theguardian.com

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I suppose we’ll have to rely on state and foreign climate agencies to get the truth about the climate impacts of human activities.

Lapaz said:

I suppose we’ll have to rely on state and foreign climate agencies to get the truth about the climate impacts of human activities.

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You’d likely experience climate change firsthand, while Trump continues to deny both its existence and any responsibility for its consequences.

Lapaz said:

I suppose we’ll have to rely on state and foreign climate agencies to get the truth about the climate impacts of human activities.

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Where it still be dismissed as fake news

Bolding mine. Reminds me of when US Sprinter Tyson Gay was referred to as Tyson Homosexual
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President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to implement his policies across the federal government mainly with sweeping executive orders. His administration has been particularly focused on removing any references to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal agencies’ websites.

Asked by a reporter on Friday in the Oval Office whether he can confirm that websites would be shut down so they can be scrubbed of DEI content, Trump said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”

Trump added: “I think DEI is dead, so if they want to scrub the websites that’s okay with me.” And in many instances they already had. The White House press office released an unsigned statement to The Washington Post saying that the American people had given Trump a mandate “to remove DEI from our federal government and reinstate a system based on merit.”

A Post review of more than 8,000 federal webpages that changed since Inauguration Day found 662 examples of deletions and additions that reflect policy changes at the heart of Trump’s campaign. “Diversity” has been deleted. “Climate resilience” is now a popular substitute for “climate change.” And “pregnant people” has been replaced by “pregnant women.”..............

The words “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” disappeared from webpages dedicated to that subject, including the Equal Employment Opportunity and Anti-Harassment statement at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization at the Department of Homeland Security struck them from a page describing its goals.

These words were even removed from old documents. At the Environmental Protection Agency, someone removed the “Diversity Commitment and Code of Conduct” from a webpage describing a conference that took place in 2021. The Post also found a March 2022 letter from the secretaries of education and of health and human services edited to remove “children and youth of color, immigrant children, children with disabilities, and those who are LGBTQ+” from a description of children at risk for pandemic-related mental health challenges.

And in the apparent effort to delete any and all DEI-sounding terminology, some changes extended into territory that had nothing to do with race or gender. For example, the word “diverse” was deleted from a page describing the breadth of the Department of the Interior’s museum collections...............

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How federal agencies have already changed their websites under Trump​

Lapaz said:

I suppose we’ll have to rely on state and foreign climate agencies to get the truth about the climate impacts of human activities.

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Just remember that you live in Alabama so it'll be much of the same as the orange leader.

DaveXA said:

It's not an anonymous letter though. It was sent through an official OPM account and is considered official communication from a federal agency. OPM is on the hook for whatever happens as a result of the letter unless the agency rescinds or makes it clear the letter is not official.

I'm well aware of the Musk "Fork in the road" letter sent to Twitter employees.

The federal government is an entirely different animal though. If they think they can stiff federal employees, they'll be in a world of hurt.

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The official OPM account that Musk has taken control of? Musk is intending to stop all federal payments that Trump doesn’t like. Musk and his employees have basically invaded federal agencies and are accessing their data and computer systems.