This is Brian Lair's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, February 6.

I'm Tiffany Hanson, filling in for Brian, who is off for a few days. The fate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination to lead

the Health and Human Services Department is still pending, though it's likely he'll be confirmed.

But the Trump administration issued a memo last week to the nation's top public health agencies,

instructing them all to end, quote, programs that use taxpayer money to promote gender ideology. These agencies

were also instructed to disable any related information from their websites. Some visitors to those

sites have since seen error messages when looking for guidance or data.

Right now at the CDC's website, for example, if you log on, there's a little yellow banner at the top of the homepage that says CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders.

The result of those modifications is that now there is less communication and less data available for anyone looking for guidance with us to talk about what reports and data have disappeared from these websites and what that might mean for your health. We are joined by Caitlin Jettelina, epidemiologist, data scientist, and author of a newsletter, your local epidemiologist.

Caitlin, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

So let's just start by talking about what's missing in terms of information, and I'm going to kind of break this down by groups.

Do we know what's missing as it relates to kids or LGBTQ kids specifically at this point?

Yeah, so, I mean, it's challenging to note, right?

So without clear explanations or any sort of transparency, it's really hard to assess what's happening, what's missing,

and honestly what also may just be manipulated in the data.

But what we do know is that a lot of these changes that are happening at HHS, which includes CDC,

is at the heart of these sweeping executive orders, particularly two that requires removing

so-called woke language from all communications and data sets. And so that includes a long list,

but some of that is the word gender, the word transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people,

LGBT and so on and so forth.

And while some of this data and the communications have been brought back online, we're

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