Trump admin must restore health data, websites, per WA lawsuit settlement
Sep. 2, 2025 at 5:49 pm
The flags of the US Department of Health and Human Services outside the agency’s headquarters, April 1, 2025 in Washington. (Al Drago / Bloomberg)
By
Elise Takahama
Seattle Times health reporter
The Trump administration has agreed to restore more than 100 health and science datasets and webpages that federal agencies wiped earlier this year, resolving a lawsuit filed in May by the Washington State Medical Association.
The settlement requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to recover any information it deleted from government websites since January, which mainly includes guidance around LGBTQ+ health, trans youth, pregnancy and reproductive care, vaccines, opioid-use treatment, and racism in health care, among other topics. Federal agencies began to remove the webpages following two of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive orders on gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The Washington State Medical Association and other plaintiff medical organizations celebrated the agreement Tuesday.
“Let’s be clear — these websites are updated and modified all the time. That’s the whole point,” said Dr. John Bramhall, president of the association and former associate medical director of Harborview Medical Center. “The issue the medical association had was the reason these were taken down. It was not scientific. It was political.”
Physicians, nurses, scientists and public health professionals across the country, including in Washington state, regularly relied on these websites and data — like those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — to deliver care and get up-to-date recommendations, Bramhall said.
“The bottom line is that a number of clinicians have found it more difficult, more tedious, more oblique to get information that was previously at their fingertips,” he said.
It’s not like this information has “disappeared completely from the face of the Earth,” Bramhall noted. Providers and public health experts still generally know about certain diseases or treatments, and have access to scientific journals and textbooks. “But they used to have an easy, one-stop shop for information, and now it’s gone,” he said.
In a Tuesday statement sent to The Seattle Times, an HHS spokesperson said the agency “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.”
The spokesperson did not respond to a question about when these websites would be restored, but Washington State Medical Association spokesperson Graham Short estimated deleted resources should be back online “in the coming weeks.”
Federal agencies started to remove these webpages following Trump’s executive orders titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
The orders reference the Trump administration’s desire to only “recognize two sexes, male and female,” and to broadly eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in government agencies.
In the following weeks, more than 100 online public health and medical recommendations, resources and datasets began to disappear, according to the lawsuit. Some addressed specific health topics, like rates of diabetes within LGBTQ+ communities or treatment for women with opioid-use disorder. Others were broader, like a list of vaccine recommendations during National Immunization Awareness Month.
“When all these websites were taken down, we were disturbed,” said Dr. Jim Polo, president of the Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, another plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We noticed right away.”
Many of these datasets seemed to “evaporate overnight,” Polo, who’s based in Gig Harbor, continued.
“Data is what helps physicians make good, reasoned decisions,” he said. “To have it missing, irrespective of what your opinion might be in terms of ideology, it makes our job all the harder.”
Another deleted dataset included recommendations on how to approach transmission of sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis, which hit record levels in the U.S. in recent years.
“Regardless of what you think about STIs and how people get them or if they should have them, it doesn’t change the fact that if someone has an STI, we as physicians need to be able to appropriately treat them,” Polo said.
The Washington State Nurses Association also joined the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for Western Washington on May 20.
“This settlement represents a win for nurses, science and patients,” Justin Gill, president of the association said in a recorded statement Tuesday. “As we said when this lawsuit was first announced, we must remain committed to standing by our values and leading with courage during chaotic times.”
Other plaintiffs included the Vermont Medical Society, and national and international groups AcademyHealth, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Fast-Track Cities Institute, International Association of Providers of AIDS Care and National LGBT Cancer Network.
Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie LLP represented plaintiffs in the case. The more than 100-year-old law firm has a history of representing Democrats in election disputes, and has previously clashed with the Trump administration, which this year signed an executive order effectively barring Perkins from handling federal cases or representing federal contractors.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has since blocked that order.
The Washington State Medical Association settlement follows a similar case filed by Doctors for America and the city and county of San Francisco that was resolved earlier this year, when a federal judge ruled all health webpages the two plaintiffs relied on must be restored.
While welcoming the legal win, Bramhall and other physicians expressed ongoing concern around eroding public trust in available health information.
“We still need to push back on that,” he said.
“The Washington State Medical Association is not a Democrat or Republican organization,” Bramhall said. “We all have our own private feelings about how the government is acting in a variety of spheres. But we need this information to provide care for Washington citizens.”
Information from The Seattle Times archives was included in this story.
Elise Takahama: 206-464-2241 or etakahama@seattletimes.com. Elise Takahama is a health reporter at The Seattle Times, where she writes about public health issues, the business of health care, medical research and health equity gaps in Washington, among other news. Born in Seattle and raised in Southern California, she's previously covered breaking news, crime and K-12 education in the Los Angeles and Boston areas.
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