A presidential executive order did more than send a political message; it disrupted a system that numerous organizations rely on when seeking grant funding, revealing the truth about health disparities, and designing effective public health interventions.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, directing federal agencies to eliminate references to “gender identity” and instead, replace with only biological definitions of “sex” in all federal policies and publications. Framed as a ban on “gender ideology,” the order has sweeping consequences—among them, the immediate removal or alteration of health data webpages and datasets across multiple federal agency websites.
Resources related to adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health, HIV monitoring, and data disaggregated by gender identity and sexual orientation were deleted. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed guidance encouraging the inclusion of women in clinical trials. Pages referencing the health impacts of structural racism and climate change also disappeared. The move not only disrupted public access to critical health information but also gutted the very infrastructure many organizations rely on to apply for grant funding, design health programs, and evaluate equity initiatives.
Required to Post, But Not Fully Restored
After legal challenges, a federal judge issued an order in February requiring the restoration of once removed webpages and datasets. In response, agencies reinstated some content, —but often with caveats. Many federal health-related webpages now include disclaimers noting that their content will be revised to comply with “new executive orders,” and some datasets have not returned in their original format or location. Others have been restored, but these datasets lack full historical context, miss key variables, or include broken links embedded in grant guidance or application materials.
This fragmented restoration process has created significant challenges for health and human service providers trying to work with funders that still expect complete and accessible data.
The Impact on Federal, State, and Foundation Grants
Most federal, state, and philanthropic grant opportunities require applicants to cite current, credible data to justify the need for proposed work. This includes statistics about disparities, community health outcomes, population trends, and social determinants of health, the non-medical factors that impact health outcomes such as income, education and zip code. Federal data sources, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER), Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), Youth Risk Factor Surveillance System (YRFSS), and the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, —have long served as the basis for evidence included in many grant proposals.
When those statistical sources are missing, altered, or difficult to find, the impact is immediate and significant. Applicants may not be able to:
- Demonstrate disparities by race, ethnicity, or gender identity.
- Meet eligibility thresholds that require geographic or demographic trends.
- Provide baseline measures necessary for evaluation and reporting.
- Access reference links in previously accepted grant language because they do not work.
This problem is especially acute for small, rural, and community-based organizations—those least likely to have in-house data analysts or access to expensive proprietary datasets. These organizations have traditionally relied on publicly available federal data to apply for funding resources. Now, they face unfair penalties in competitive grant reviews for uncontrollable data gaps.
A Cascading Effect on Equity Initiatives
Without disaggregated public data, demonstrating inequity is difficult and addressing it through funding initiatives more challenging. In the months following the executive order, many organizations discovered that their planned or ongoing grant initiatives for violence prevention, LGBTQ+ health services, maternal health, and rural behavioral health programs were in jeopardy due to outright cancellations or the loss of critical federal data required to justify and structure their proposed work.
Even state grant programs, which often mirror federal standards or rely on federal benchmarks for target-setting, have been affected. Foundations, too, face new challenges in trying to compare need across regions or measure equity-focused outcomes when federal indicators are missing or unstable.
As a result, the disappearance of data becomes not just a bureaucratic issue but a barrier to funding essential programs and services.
What Needs to Be Done
- Federal agencies must recommit to providing disaggregated, accessible health data that is available in a stable, consistent format. Changes should be transparent, and archived versions should remain searchable for multi-year grant applications.
- Funders—public and private—should revise application expectations to acknowledge unavailable or unstable data and permit alternative forms of data in grant applications.
- Investments in local and regional data capacity can help fill knowledge gaps because community-based organizations should not be expected to reconstruct information that was once a shared public resource.
In grantmaking, what we can prove is what we can fund. When data disappears, so does opportunity. To restore a fair and functional funding ecosystem, we must protect the evidence it relies on.