President Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are making life difficult for some public health officials, who view eliminating racial disparities as part of their mission.
President Trump’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts is provoking heated debate within his administration — and the public health field more broadly — over whether words like “race,” “equity” and “disparity” are too politically toxic to use.
The latest battle erupted on Monday, inside the domain of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., when employees of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received an email instructing them to avoid using more than a dozen “key words” when writing annual goals for performance evaluations. The disfavored terms, according to copies of the email reviewed by The New York Times, included “health equity,” “race,” “bias,” “disparity,” “culturally appropriate” and “stereotype.”
In Washington, the C.D.C.’s parent agency, the Health and Human Services Department, insisted that there was no “official or unofficial CDC list of banned words,” and accused C.D.C. officials of trying to undermine Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump by “intentionally falsifying and misrepresenting guidance they receive.”
The C.D.C. issued a clarifying email saying that the words were still permissible after The Times inquired. But the dispute exposes much deeper tensions, both internal and external, over Mr. Trump’s work to reshape the federal government by rooting out what his allies call “woke ideology.”
Throughout the agency, career scientists and civil servants have been on high alert since Mr. Trump issued a directive for departments to crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. A big chunk of the C.D.C.’s work is promoting “health equity” by narrowing disparities between different groups.
That work does not necessarily involve reducing disparities between white people and other racial groups; there are all kinds of health disparities, including between rich and poor, or rural and urban, that are driven by factors like income, education and access to good housing.