In a series of Sunday morning tweets, Trump CDC Director and diehard conservative Brenda Fitzgerald sought to clarify new reports that members of her agency have been prohibited from including seven "forbidden" phrases in next year's budget documents.
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden terms at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden terms are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
Multiple CDC officials "confirmed" the existence of the list to the Washington Post, but in her Twitter comments, and currently featured as her "pinned" tweet, Fitzgerald gave a limited denial that specifically did not address whether the list existed and had been presented to agency staff.
I want to assure you there are no banned words at CDC. We will continue to talk about all our important public health programs.
You may be understandably concerned about recent media reports alleging that CDC is banned from using certain words in budget documents. I want to assure you that CDC remains committed to our public health mission as a science- and evidence-based institution. [...]
HHS statement addressing media reports: "The assertion that HHS has 'banned words' is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process. HHS will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans."
As numerous Americans were quick to point out, the Fitzgerald and HHS statements conspicuously do not deny that the agency was given a list of words not to be used in preparing budget documents, nor do they deny that there was a 90-minute meeting with CDC policy analysts in which they were given this instruction.
The denial is instead hinged on whether those words are, quote, "banned", while remaining silent on whether the agency was requested to avoid terms such as fetus or transgender in their official documents—and whether her analysts were informed of what possible actions might be taken, by the list-makers, if they ignored that request.
The rest of Fitzgerald's tweets (in the same thread) assure the public that "science is and will remain the foundation of our work" and that the CDC will continue to be "based on the best available science and data." Which is, again, important to hear, but not a denial.
What we can infer from the CDC Director's statements is that, indeed, Trump administration officials indeed gave the agency a list of specific terms that they did not want to see in future CDC budget requests, and that those words, such as "fetus", consist of the ones stated in the Washington Post's report. We can also infer from this that while the CDC team may not have been directly ordered to discontinue use of the terms, the budget submitted by the agency would be judged negatively if such words were included. And a common-sense look at this list of unfavorable words tells us that this was a request from partisan, rather than policy-minded, administration officials who are attempting to limit the use of phrases, like "fetus" or "science-based", that they consider antithetical to far-right policy stances.
If Fitzgerald meant to deny those crucial elements of the story, it seems likely she would have done so. Instead both she and HHS are asserting only that the meeting in which policy analysts were told to refrain from using certain terms was "mischaracterized." That's not going to be enough to deflect from the next obvious question: Who in the administration, specifically, came up with and distributed this list of words to members of her agency and others?
This should be a simple enough thing to find out, in coming weeks, but the CDC Director could herself inform the public of this information if she so desired.