Hi friends 👋🏻

Ugh. It's beyond frustrating to have to write about this topic, but here we go. Over the past week I talked to multiple clients who are considering removing certain words from their websites in response to actions taken by the Trump administration. And online debates are busy on this topic too, like here and here.

While there's no one-size-fits-all answer on this question, there are a few points I want to highlight that others have found helpful, to help you get some perspective on how to respond.

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What started this?

Among the flood of executive actions from the Trump administration, several involved making sure the federal government isn't providing any $$ to organizations or projects that do silly things like recognize that there are more than two genders, or focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility. (Yes, in case I need to say it, silly = sarcasm.) There are a million news articles about this. Here are a couple if you need to catch up, from the Washington Post, ProPublica, and Science.

What's the response?

Organizations – in particular those that receive federal funding – are scrambling to respond. A common question is arising: "Should we scrub our website of DEI language?"

In particular, I've heard from clients that have seen lists of targeted keywords like those in the WaPo article, and are considering trying to remove all of them (or perhaps just some of them??) from their websites.

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I have a few thoughts in response to all this. They won't definitively answer the question for anyone, but I do think they're important to consider.

1. The internet has a long memory

Have you heard of the Wayback Machine, AKA the Internet Archive? It captures snapshots of websites, dating back years, and currently has historical records of over 916 billion web pages. Before you go deleting your organization's DEI statement, or removing the word "equity" from your mission statement, check to see if past or current versions of those pages are captured by the internet archive. If they are, are you really hiding from the federal funding word police effectively?

2. Your content isn't only on your website

Sure, you could delete the words "equity", "female", "gender", and "trauma" from your entire website (really, they're all on the list). There are even people out there offering AI-based tools to help you do it. But your website likely isn't the only place you've published that content over the past however-many years.

I bet you've sent emails, published social media posts, and shared PDF or print annual reports with those now-dangerous words in them. You can't reach out into the world and pull those back.

3. What would you replace those words with?

If you tell your team that they need to pause everything this week and focus on scrubbing certain keywords from your website (above points notwithstanding), what would you replace them with?

Sure, you might be able to be a bit more wordy in some places and replace "discrimination" with "unfair actions toward certain groups or individuals" (yes, that was a suggestion in one social post last week).

But ultimately, if your work involves any of these dangerous topics, that's going to be obvious to anyone reviewing a funding application whether you use certain keywords or not. Sure, you might survive a scan of a grant application that simply checks for a list of keywords, but even an AI tool is more sophisticated than that, let alone a human reviewer responsible for considering applications for an NIH or NSF grant, for example.

4. Is it ethical? Are actions more important than words?

Beyond all the technical questions I've outlined above, this really boils down to a set of ethical and pragmatic questions.

• If our organization is committed to advancing equity, what does it say about us if we're willing to remove statements to that effect from our website?
• Is it ok to remove that language so long as we keep "doing the work"?
• If we can keep the funding flowing by removing the language, and thus maintain important services, is that trade-off ok?

I can't answer those questions for you.

But in my opinion, if the federal government (or any funder) wants to stop funding X and X is what you do, it's probably unavoidable that you'll lose funding.

I hate that that's the case. That we have a government that wants to stop advancing equity for women and people of color, to stop vital medical research, to stop protecting trans and nonbinary people, to stop tackling accessibility challenges for people with disabilities.

I don't think the solution is replacing words on websites.

I'd suggest we'll see more of the outcomes we want by being loud about what is being defunded. By being loud about the work you now can't do, and the damage that causes.

Every elected official has constituents who will be hurt by these funding changes. Make sure those stories reach those congressional offices, with enough volume and frequency that they can't be ignored.

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