People applying for grants and certificates using the Small Business Administration's website used to see a photograph of a group of people of varying ages, genders, and skin tones smiling in front of a white board.
In mid-February, the SBA removed the image from its website, documents shared with NPR show.
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A person with knowledge of the SBA's website update said the minor task of removing the photo was strangely urgent.
"If someone says stop everything, do this specifically … it's reserved for just instances where there's like a system failure" said the person, who requested anonymity to share internal documentation fearing reprisal. "To have an immediate deployment of … a visual change is very, very uncommon."
SBA did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
Across the federal government, agencies have been busy scrubbing photographic and written references about women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community from their websites.
In at least one instance, NPR's reporting shows that the Department of Veterans Affairs is aware that removing categories of people from the agency's website can affect the delivery of the services it provides.
Agencies say the removals are to comply with President Trump's executive orders removing "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies." The removals aren't universal, and sometimes pages are restored as agencies figure out what compliance means.
Transgender and non-binary people, on the other hand, are explicitly targeted by a separate executive order and faced the most consistent removal from government websites.
Historians warn that this kind of systematic erasure has in the past come when governments strip rights from people, starting from the most marginalized groups.
"If you erase the memory, we really forget the people," said Alessio Ponzio, whose research focuses on LGBTQ history and women's studies and is a visiting professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. "It's an act of violence that is very subtle but can really destroy the psychology of people. Basically, 'I'm telling you that I do not recognize you.'"
"Women", "girls", people of color
"Immigrant children, children with disabilities, and those who are LGBTQ+" were removed from a 2022 letter from the Biden administration to governors about supporting school-based health services in late January.
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The Department of Education did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
The State Department instructed its staff to not mention a list of terms and phrases including "women" and "girls" when trying to attract international students to come to study in the US, though the agency later rescinded the direction, NPR reported recently.
The Defense Department issued a Feb. 26 memo instructing the military to remove digital content that "focus on immutable characteristics, such as race, ethnicity or sex" by early March.
Arlington National Cemetery removed its education programs about the history of women and people of color in the armed services though some biographies remain available on its site. The Army and the Navy removed web pages about the history of women in the military and ones about a decorated Japanese-American Army unit and pages about Navajo Code Talkers.
A page celebrating the military service of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who integrated major league baseball, was also been taken down. The Air Force took down, among other pages, a 2019 profile of the 10 women who piloted one specific stealth bomber that carried out important missions. The archived profile shows that at that point, the 10 women made up about 2% of all the pilots who flew the aircraft.
Some of the pages about the Japanese-American unit and the Code Talkers have since been restored after their removal received attention and media coverage. After this story was published, Jackie Robinson's page was restored.
The Pentagon marked tens of thousands photographs for removal, the Associated Press reported. Some were of war heroes, many photos feature women and people of color.
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"This administration has hung a sign outside the armed forces saying if you're not a white male, you are no longer welcome," said Sue Fulton, senior advisor to advocacy group SPARTA Pride and formerly an assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
"And that's a tragedy because it's going to make our military weaker," says Fulton. "It's not just about getting rid of trans people and gay people and women and black folks. It's about getting rid of leaders. It's about disrupting units, taking people out of those units who are fully trained and fully qualified and replacing them with who? People who pass Trump's ideological test?"
Spokespersons from the military branches say they're complying with the memo and executive orders.
"The Navy continues to execute and implement all directives issued by the President with professionalism, efficiency, and in full alignment with national security," said Navy spokesperson, Lieutenant Commander Lauren Chatmas.
"Social media posts were removed, archived, or changed to avoid noncompliance with executive orders," said Army spokesperson Major Travis Shaw.
The Air Force did not respond to requests for comment.
Agencies respond differently to Trump orders
While there's no comprehensive analysis on how much content each agency has removed, each agency seems to be going about it their own way. NASA asked its staff to scrub "anything specifically targeting women" off of its website in late January, according to 404 Media.
Following the directive, some articles featuring women went dark, including one about Rose Ferreira, who was born in the Dominican Republic and was featured when she was an intern at NASA. The incident prompted a public outcry, and Ferreira's page, along with some others, were restored. According to the Internet Archive records, her profile went dark at least on Feb 7 before it went back up again.
But Ferreira said the restoration of the feature invited more harassment. "I started getting messages from people, who I guess were late to the conversation, calling me a liar, or saying that I was attacking NASA and that I was trying to cause drama," she told NPR.
Ferreira said that she was proud when NASA profiled her - but she now resents how her story was subject to the whims of a changed administration. "I didn't ask for it [the feature]. You didn't give it to me. I earned it … If it's so easily removable, then what was the point?"
In a statement to NPR, NASA said the agency is "looking at content that was previously removed out of an abundance of caution and restoring content as appropriate," as it complies with executive orders.
Historical articles on agency websites have also been edited as a result of the executive orders. The National Park Service removed references to transgender people from an article by historian Wendy Rouse titled "The Very Queer History of the Suffragist Movement" as part of the agency's commemoration of the movement. When Rouse requested that the original version of her article be restored, the Park Service took it down.
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"While we initially attempted to edit your article in an attempt to keep the rest of the content active, we have since removed it so as not to alter your work," the agency wrote to Rouse, in an email Rouse shared with NPR.
Transgender people are the biggest targets
Rolling back societal recognition of transgender people was a key part of President Trump's campaign platform that was quickly expressed as a series of executive orders after he took office. Many agencies have removed references to transgender people, including the Centers for Disease Control, the National Park Service, the State Department, and the Social Security Administration.
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The Department of Health and Human Services effort to remove references to transgender people from its websites, including the CDC's, was halted by a court order. The removal of transgender people from the Park Service's website introducing the Stonewall monument has led to protests at the monument itself.
The administration's actions targeting transgender people follow a drumbeat of misleading content about transgender people spread by far-right activists in recent years. Those narratives focused on unsubstantiated threats of sex crime, concerns about fairness in women's sports and healthcare for minors with gender dysphoria diagnoses, as conservative influencers used transgender issues to garner money, fame and support for Trump.
It's not the first time transgender people became a target of governments, historians say. They were one of the groups that were persecuted early alongside suspected communists and Jews by Nazi Germany, said Laurie Marhoefer, a specialist on the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany at the University of Washington who also studies transgender and queer history.
"Transgender people are the canary in the coal mine of democracy," said Marhoefer.
There are instances in which these efforts could have serious consequences for people the government is supposed to serve. The Department of Veterans Affairs' suicide prevention strategy mandates community outreach to veterans vulnerable to suicide, including transgender veterans, whom the department now declines to name.
The agency's own research shows that LGBTQ veterans are more likely than the average veteran to take their own lives, and transgender veterans even more so. Veterans already have a higher average suicide rate than the general population.
In an internal memo that NPR obtained dated Feb. 20, the Department of Veterans Affairs proposed editing all external communication, which includes its website, to remove the term "gender" and only use "sex", as well as taking out the letter "T" from the term "LGBTQ+ Care".
The memo also included an analysis of risks of the proposals, which includes "potential to impact Veteran access to care of Veteran perception of welcome at HVA facilities".
This week, the department says it will deny gender-affirming treatment to new patients altogether.
The VA did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin and Greg Myre contributed reporting
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