
The Trump administration wants to censor a number of words and, in effect topics, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Donald Trump has a far-right agenda in public policy — and he wants to force scientific agencies to reflect his own biases in their work.

As the Washington Post reports, his administration is taking the unbelievably Orwellian step of banning researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using several specific terms, thereby all but censoring the topics altogether.

Policy analysts at the CDC were given a list of the proscribed words at a recent meeting with officials who oversee the agency's budget.


"The forbidden words are 'vulnerable,' 'entitlement,' 'diversity,' 'transgender,' 'fetus,' 'evidence-based' and 'science-based,'" an analyst who took part in the briefing told the Post.

"In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of 'science-based' or 'evidence-based,' the suggested phrase is 'CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,' the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered."

Essentially, the CDC is being banned from using words related to diversity, poverty, or facts in general.

This policy will effectively ban the study of certain topics. For instance, crafting a government study on the health of the transgender community will be almost impossible if the word 'transgender' is banned from use in discussion and reporting. And the CDC's crucial work on the devastating Zika virus, which causes horrific birth defects and brain damage, involves research on the afflicted fetus — research that would be difficult to write or speak about if analysts cannot use the word "fetus."

Politically motivated research restriction is not new for Republicans, who have for two decades banned the CDC from studying gun violence.

But Trump’s blacklist — which takes aim at the poor and vulnerable, and marginalizes the very concept of scientific evidence — is restrictive enough that it would impede the CDC’s entire mission.

Trump is apparently not going to stop until he has destroyed every single federal government agency, and taken the health and well-being of the whole country down at the same time.