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President Donald Trump already has signed more executive orders since January 2025 than during his entire first term—and more than many presidents signed during their tenures in office. But one order has gone far beyond the others in reshaping the ecosystem of information the government and so many others, rely on.
“EO14168 has been overwhelmingly responsible for driving changes to federal forms and survey data,” says Melanie Klein, an analyst with the federal monitoring organization dataindex.us who has been tracking these alterations. Although Trump signed EO14168—better known by its title “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—on his first day in office, data experts are still getting a sense of its far-reaching scope.
Of more than 500 federal databases affected by Trump’s myriad executive orders, nearly three quarters were revised because of the Defending Women order alone. Most of the cases involved removing trans-inclusive gender identity options from survey forms, leaving people to choose between male or female.
These change have affected “really critical programs like the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline or data collections about runaway and homeless youth,” Klein says. These have been among the removals that, over the past year, have garnered widespread concern because trans people are known to experience higher rates of suicide and homelessness than others—crises that have grown worse as a result of the administration’s anti-trans policies and rhetoric. “Without the data, disparities don’t just magically disappear, but they do become more difficult to document and address,” says Caroline Medina, a senior advisor for data policy at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
But the erasures are far more sweeping than that. “The breadth and diversity of the removals is really quite astounding,” Medina told me. According to a recent report from the Williams Institute, Trump’s order has affected some of the government’s most frequently used forms, including citizenship and passport applications and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Compared to the erratic erasures of webpages during the first few weeks of the administration, which left more visible digital scars, most of the datasets in question were amended quietly. When agencies modify a survey or database, they have a few options for how to record the revision, and “a lot of the changes that we’ve seen fall into two buckets,” Medina says.
A handful were revised under a lengthy protocol that invites public oversight. But another recent MAP report found that 83 percent went through a so-called non-substantiative review process. “This allows agencies to really quickly and swiftly remove questions with limited public visibility,” says Klein, who spent the last year tracking alterations to federal data collections.
This more obscured pipeline is usually reserved for “technical tweaks,” Medina adds, but “I would argue that these are meaningful changes.” If the modifications were classified as “substantiative” revisions, they would have been posted for public comment, something Trump has spent the last year skirting. Whatever value the administration places—or doesn’t—in public feedback, collecting that input remains valuable for things like future litigation, Medina says: “It’s a really important accountability tool—still.” (Trump’s order has spawned dozens of lawsuits already.)
But more surprising than the secrecy around the changes is the sheer number of them, given how little data on gender the government collects to begin with. A few national surveys—mainly focused on gender-based discrimination, health disparities, and violence—had asked about gender identity for a decade or so, but the majority of resources scrubbed were part of a far more recent push to improve federal data on gender.
The Census Bureau, the government’s statistical powerhouse, only started testing questions on gender identity in its American Community Survey in late 2024. Had that barely launched trial not folded under the second Trump administration, it might have been a stepping stone to including gender questions on the census itself, which has only ever asked whether respondents are male or female.
Such efforts were spurred by a few executive orders under the Biden administration that Trump rescinded on his first day in office. “Those were big milestones, that are now unfortunately being dismantled,” Medina says.
Nowhere is that more true than in Health and Human Services, which accounted for nearly half of all data deletions from the Defending Women order. A thorough scrubbing of HHS datasets is not surprising given how, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, the department has taken aim at trans people time and time again.
However, previously, “HHS was a real hub for data and research on LGBTQ people,” Meghan Maury-Fox, a senior advisor for data policy in the Biden White House, wrote in an email. The department was among the first to collect any data on gender and sexuality, initially in assessments of HIV risk, homelessness, and other health concerns known to disproportionately affect queer and trans communities.
These health disparity measures were among the data collections altered or discontinued, alongside others pertaining to a wide range of health issues, from reports on food-borne illness to forms used to record the deaths of patients with end-stage kidney disease.
According to Maury-Fox, the breadth of the HHS revisions stems from past efforts to ensure that federal health programs didn’t neglect the unique needs of queer and trans populations. Under the Obama administration, HHS hired one of the first federal staff members to focus on gender and sexuality. (They only recently left.) The department also housed one of the few government offices dedicated to incorporating those populations into research—which the National Institutes of Health began dismantling in December 2024, well before Inauguration Day, figuring the new Trump administration would finish it off.
Now HHS, along with several other federal agencies, has even exceeded what the Defending Women executive order asked for. In at least 60 instances, the government removed data on people’s sexual orientation, which the order did not cover. “There is a sense of over-complying,” Klein says. And though the rate of removals has slowed as agencies run out of gender-related data to target, “there are still requests coming in to carry out the implementation of that executive order.”
Trump’s minions, that is, have kept up the search, sometimes circling back to further scrub massive datasets involving civil rights complaints and clinical trials. At this point, though, even the experts are not entirely sure how much gender data remains for the administration to sniff out. We may not know until it’s gone.
