The Trump administration restores federal webpages after court order
The Trump administration brought webpages back online, meeting a court-ordered deadline at 11:59PM on February 11th.
Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, filed suit last week against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for taking health data off government websites.
A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, setting a deadline for those agencies to make that information available again online. The order includes more than a dozen CDC and FDA webpages that were specifically mentioned in the lawsuit. That includes the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index, for example, which are tools that show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks.
Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, filed suit
DFA alleges that the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act by removing public access to the webpages without giving adequate notice in advance. The CDC, FDA, and HHS didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge.
The agencies started taking webpages down after President Donald Trump signed an anti-trans executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” on his first day in office. The CDC’s main data portal went down briefly before going live again with a note saying, “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply” with the executive order.
The court order says webpages are supposed to be restored to versions as of January 30th. The Verge wasn’t able to immediately verify whether the restored pages have the same content they had on January 30th.
The plaintiffs claim that removing the data forced DFA members “to scramble in search of alternative resources to guide how they treat patients; slowed their clinical practices or reduced the amount of information they can convey to patients in time-limited visits; and paused or slowed their vital research.” They say a temporary restraining order is necessary to protect their practices and public health while the lawsuit determines whether the defendants’ actions were lawful or not.
Beyond the webpages named in the lawsuit, the defendants are also supposed to work with DFA to identify any other resources that need to be restored, setting a February 14th deadline for those webpages to become available again.
