Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship
- CDC-PHP Media Communications
- Apr 11
- 3 min read
A growing list of words and materials are being scrubbed from government websites and documents in an attempt by the Trump administration to remove all references not only to diversity, equity and inclusion, but also to climate change, vaccines, and a host of other topics.
PEN America has compiled a list of more than 250 words and phrases reportedly no longer considered acceptable by the Trump administration, from “abortion,” to “women,” and including “disability,” “elderly,” “Native American” and, unsurprisingly, the “Gulf of Mexico.”
Our list is most assuredly incomplete. The New York Times published a list of words banned by federal agencies. Additional terms were reported by Reuters, The Washington Post, Propublica, Science, Gizmodo, 404 Media, and Popular Information, which have been aggregated into a single list, below.
Some of these moves seem tragically comical, like the elimination of photos from a Defense Department database of the World War II B-29 aircraft Enola Gay while erasing the recognition of the service of LGBTQ+ Americans who served in the military. But this is not just the ham-handed applications of President Trump’s executive orders. The reckless manner in which this is being done without regard to the consequences illustrates its nefarious intent.
“How can we have intelligent or difficult conversations if we can’t even use the words, the most basic unit of meaning?” said Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director of U.S. Free Expression Programs. “We’re now living in a country where the government has decided that a sweeping array of everyday terms will now be erased and forbidden in government agencies, websites, or even scientific research proposals. These prohibitions on language are utterly chilling, and will impede efforts to research real world problems and advance human knowledge.”
The White House has said it did not create a banned words list but has instead left it to federal agencies to interpret how to comply with executive orders that solely recognize male and female sex or eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Nonetheless, some departments have added terms that seem to have nothing at all to do with those executive orders.
In fact, any topic that has “received recent attention from Congress” or “widespread or critical media attention” may be subject to deletion or alteration at the National Cancer Institute, ProPublica reported.
Even the term “cancer moonshot,” which refers to a program that aimed to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by half, has been targeted for erasure, presumably because it was started under the Obama administration and championed by Joe Biden during his term.
These policies’ tentacles already extend beyond government websites, though removing HIV resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, regardless of whether they mentioned “gender ideology” or other banned terms, is bad enough. Reports say scientists are self-censoring in hopes of improving their chances of getting government grants.
That’s exactly the sort of response the administration is hoping for, and it will immeasurably limit the research and other work supported by the federal government, universities and more, on the public’s behalf.
While every president aims to use language that reflects its priorities in its communications, the widespread restrictions on specific words represent a dystopian effort to control what Americans think and say, despite President Trump’s lip service to “freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.”
There’s nothing “free” about banning words or ideas.
Banned Words List
