The website for USAID, the U.S. government agency that distributes foreign aid, went down on Saturday, and it’s unclear when it may return. The outage comes as every federal website has been ordered to erase forbidden words, though USAID’s outage could related to reports that Donald Trump plans to put most of the agency under control of the U.S. State Department, according to Reuters.
Posts on X suggest the USAID website may have redirected to the White House website for a time before going dark completely, but Gizmodo couldn’t independently confirm that. USAID’s press office didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed on Saturday.
Previously, the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, census.gov, went offline around 5 p.m. ET on Friday. That disruption happened shortly after CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs tweeted that some government websites were slated to go dark Friday evening at precisely 5 p.m., citing White House officials. Jacobs reported later the outage at government websites was related to an attempt to remove “diversity-related content,” and the Census website was restored about an hour later.
Gizmodo reported Friday on the plans at the CDC to scrub that agency’s website of all “gender ideology,” as the Trump administration has called it, a euphemism for anything Trump opposes relating to LGBT rights and the role of women in society. Elizabeth Murray, a pediatrician who specializes in treating children who are the victims of sexual abuse, reported on TikTok that an app from the CDC that tells doctors how to treat kids who’ve been raped has been taken offline.
“This is the CDC sexually transmitted infection treatment guidelines app,” the pediatrician said. “We use this to figure out the right dose to treat a young child who’s acquired a sexually transmitted infection after being abused. Little kids need different dosing than adults, and this gets updated pretty frequently depending on drug resistance and other things. So apparently helping little kids who’ve been sexually assaulted is just too woke now. But that’s where we are.”
Trump’s ideological purge of the government has been swift, as the fascist president has issued a flurry of executive orders and illegally attempted to shut down government spending on programs he opposes. A federal judge ruled on Friday that Trump must cease trying to stop the flow of money that had been properly allocated by Congress.
The CDC’s website has been stripped of vital information, including data on HIV intended for doctors to be able to speak with patients about treatment, according to Time magazine. A page called “HIV Nexus: CDC Resources for Clinicians” was just one of many pages on the CDC website that are no longer available, a result of the agency being directed to scrub words and entire reports that mention LGBT issues.
Just about every agency seems to have been impacted by the draconian censorship and pervading culture of fear now present in the federal government apparatus. HuffPost congressional reporter Jen Bendery wrote on Bluesky that a source at the Environmental Protection Agency was concerned about the way that communications were now being monitored at the EPA after a recent Microsoft software update.
“It’s likely your status on Teams is being monitored, and a hint was dropped to us by someone higher up in EPA that they may be monitoring Teams calls. We now have to be careful of what we say on Teams calls,” the EPA staffer was quoted as saying.
The U.S. Department of Justice deleted a charges database for January 6th defendants, according to the political transparency group CREW. And given the scope of the purge, it seems likely it could take a long time before the U.S. public has any idea how much knowledge has been scrubbed from the web by their own government.
