Forget DEI buzzwords—the Trump administration’s government censorship ordinance is now infringing on language that will make it nearly impossible for agencies to do their job.
A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words “climate” and “vulnerable,” as well as the phrase “safe drinking water.”
Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are “greenhouse gas emissions,” “methane emissions,” “sustainable construction,” “solar energy,” and “geothermal,” as well as “nuclear energy,” “diesel,” “affordable housing,” “prefabricated housing,” “runoff,” “microplastics,” “water pollution,” “soil pollution,” “groundwater pollution,” “sediment remediation,” “water collection,” “water treatment,” “rural water,” and “clean water,” among dozens of others.
“When evaluating agreements, those entries that include these terms or similar terms cannot be submitted,” wrote Sharon Strickland, the USDA’s Northeast area financial management, travel and agreements section head, in an internal March 20 email. The review will “ensure that we maintain compliance with the Administration’s EOS.”
It’s unclear how the guidance would do anything other than completely hinder the department’s ability to monitor the health and edibility of crops, or aid America’s rural development—some of its primary functions. What is clear, however, is that purging such basic speech will stifle scientific research and discourse.
Donald Trump began censoring the government as soon as he returned to office. In January, the Office of Management and Budget held tens of billions in federal funding hostage, requiring executive branch agencies to purge language related to “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, “woke gender ideology,” and “illegal aliens” in their reports and missions. Otherwise, they would forgo their congressionally appropriated funds, per an OMB memo.
That threat has since rolled its way through the American legal system. Last week, an appeals court upheld a block on the sweeping freeze, agreeing with a previous court’s ruling that the 22-state coalition that brought the lawsuit would “irreparably suffer” under Trump’s ordinance.
“These harms included the obligation of new debt; the inability to pay existing debt; impediments to planning, hiring, and operations; and disruptions to research projects by state universities,” wrote Chief Judge David Barron.
Barron’s ruling echoed a similar decision issued by Judge Loren AliKhan in February, in which the federal judge indefinitely blocked Trump’s effort.
“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”
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