The Trump administration has agreed to restore dozens of health-related websites and datasets as part of a legal settlement with nine medical organizations that filed suit in May to challenge the federal government’s “unlawful removal” of thousands of health-related webpages and datasets.

The Washington State Medical Association and other groups challenged “the unannounced and unprecedented deletion” of taxpayer-funded websites that health providers use to care for patients, perform research, and protect public health. 

The lawsuit, filed in May in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, named Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr as the defendant, along with five other Trump administration officials. 

The settlement marks the third time that the Trump administration has restored public health information because of a lawsuit.

“This was not a partisan issue,” said John Bramhall, MD, PhD, president of the Washington State Medical Association. “Open data benefits everyone, and ensuring its availability should be a bipartisan priority.”

Many of the missing webpages — expected to be republished within a few weeks — provided information about pregnancy, opioid use disorder, and AIDS. 

Websites Purged After Trump Executive Order

Federal health agencies purged thousands of websites in late January to comply with Trump’s executive orders about transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI]. Federal officials ordered agencies to scrub their websites of information on the word “gender” and references to “pregnant people.”

Doctors and researchers around the world were alarmed when the information disappeared on January 31, said Bramhall, whose association was joined in the lawsuit by the Washington State Nurses Association; the Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; AcademyHealth, Washington, DC; the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care; the Fast-Track Cities Institute, the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care; the National LGBT Cancer Network; and the Vermont Medical Society.

“This was trusted health information that vanished in a blink of an eye,” Bramhall said. “Not only was our ability to provide care to our patients compromised, but our trust in our federal health institutions has also been badly shaken.”

The Trump administration didn’t file a response to the lawsuit with the court to defend its actions.

“The fact that they decided to settle and put all the data back is probably, hopefully, a recognition that it should never have been taken down in the first place,” said Aaron Carroll, MD, president and CEO of AcademyHealth, a nonprofit professional society for public health policy researchers.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not comment on the lawsuit or settlement. In a statement, the spokesperson said, “HHS remains committed to its mission of removing radical gender and DEI ideology from federal programs, subject to applicable law, to ensure taxpayer dollars deliver meaningful results for the American people.”

Latest in a String of Lawsuits

In February, Judge John D. Bates of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to restore missing websites and data sets. His order came in response to a lawsuit from Doctors for America, a progressive advocacy group.

In May, federal judge Leo Sorokin of the US District Court of Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore articles written by two Harvard Medical School researchers while the case proceeds.

Those two cases probably influenced the Trump administration’s decision to settle the latest lawsuit, said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

After hundreds of layoffs at the Department of Justice, which defends the government from lawsuits, the agency is now short on staff. So it’s likely that senior officials in the agency didn’t want to devote their small staff’s time to a lawsuit they were likely to lose, Bagley said.

The federal government “didn’t have a great reason to take the webpages down in the first place,” Bagley said. “They were just waging a culture war. They have a pretty good idea at this point of which way the wind is blowing. You can ask yourself the hard question of whether this is really worth the time and energy to litigate.”

No One Left to Collect Data

In some cases, the federal government has restored websites that describe datasets, but not the data itself, Carroll said.

That’s the case for one vitally important resource, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which collected survey data about maternal health from 50 states and territories, Carroll said.

Although consumers can read about the program online, they can no longer make data requests. That’s because the Trump administration stopped collecting PRAMS data in January and laid off the program’s staff in June.

Now, if researchers or policymakers go to the PRAMS website, they see a message that says, “Data requests are not currently being processed.” Instead, the website provides contact information for 50 state and territorial program coordinators, whom researchers must contact individually. Researchers must then “clean and harmonize” the disparate data sets themselves, Carroll said.

But the loss of this data is more than just academic, Carroll said. Public health leaders have used the data to save lives.

For example, when PRAMS revealed alarmingly high smoking rates among pregnant women in West Virginia, public health officials sent nurses to visit expectant mothers at home to help them stop smoking, Carroll said. Smoking rates among pregnant women fell from 25% in 2018 to 10% in 2022, leading to fewer preterm births and infant deaths. 

Other webpages that remain offline include a CDC site with information about HIV and transgender patients, which currently says, “The page you’re looking for was not found.” An FDA webpage about health equity in artificial intelligence contains no data.