Trump return set to wipe government language of climate change, LGBTQ rights, immigration
Experts predict a shift in government language, with references to diversity and other issues being removed or downplayed
As president-elect Donald Trump prepares to assume the White House on January 20, the federal government is bracing for a massive overhaul in policy – and how it labels issues and individuals.
Potentially limited or wiped from official government websites and documents are references to climate change, “undocumented immigrants” or “non-citizens” in favour of “illegal aliens” and prominent mentions of LGBTQ rights, experts say.
Ahead of Trump’s first term, researchers expected to see changes that were more subtle – like references to “impacts” versus “effects” of climate change, explained Gretchen Gehrke, Website Monitoring Program Lead at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative.
“And we did see a fair amount of content changes like that, but what we mostly saw was straight up deletion,” she said. “We mostly saw massive access reductions, a lot of information suppression.”
This time, Gehrke and other policy advocates are bracing for an even more extreme shift. From references to climate change to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, the likely changes could be more significant than mere semantics.
“It’s important how things are presented; it’s important to not get rid of actually talking about carbon emissions and actually talking about methane, to just talk about some sort of hand-wavy ‘sustainability’ without saying what that means,” Gehrke said.
“We can’t actually address a problem that we can’t name.”
