A judge ordered federal health agencies Tuesday to restore online datasets taken down after President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting the government from promoting “gender ideology.”
U.S. District Judge John Bates agreed to issue the temporary order in favor of Doctors for America (DFA), a left-leaning physicians advocacy group that sued by claiming the scrubbing violated federal law.
After holding a hearing Monday, the judge agreed it likely violated a provision requiring agencies to provide adequate notice before terminating significant information products.
“This opinion has documented the harm DFA members have suffered and will continue to suffer absent intervention, but the harm extends beyond them,” Bates, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, wrote in his ruling.
“DFA has also supplied declarations from doctors around the country who, although not DFA members themselves, are representative of the widespread disruption that defendants’ abrupt removal of these critical healthcare materials has caused,” he added.
Federal health agencies were ordered to scrub the data by last Friday after Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office stating that the U.S. will only recognize two sexes,
Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed various public datasets, like the Drug Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, the data and statistics webpage for Adolescent and School Health and the webpages for the Social Vulnerability Index.
Several sites focusing on HIV/AIDS were also temporarily taken down as federal employees scrambled to comply with the order.
Health care workers and researchers regularly use the data, leading them to rush to archive the information before the government pulled it down.
Zachary Shelley, an attorney at Public Citizen, which represents the physicians’ group, told the judge at Monday’s hearing that doctors were already being harmed by the websites being taken down.
“You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube that has already come out,” Shelley said. “You can stop it from flowing out going forward. Every day that this goes on, there’s harm to the doctors and their patients and public health.”
James Harlow, a Justice Department senior trial attorney, urged the judge to not grant the emergency request. The government argued the physicians group lacks legal standing, it hasn’t shown it will face irreparable harm and the scrubbing was not a “final agency action” subject to the courts’ review.
“Each argument has substance, but none prevail,” the judge wrote.
Harlow also insisted the notice provision central to the plaintiffs’ challenge did not apply.
“There’s no evidence that plaintiffs have offered that this is in fact the endpoint of the CDC review of these websites,” he said.
