The Trump Administration Web Sites I Keep Thinking Will Disappear But Don’t

By Dave Levitan | August 19, 2025 | 9:35am

Photo via The White House/Wikimedia Commons

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The Trump Administration Web Sites I Keep Thinking Will Disappear But Don’t

Back in May, I made a list of a few of the “totally normal” things I do while covering a lawless and dictatorial administration, minor developed habits that were either driving me insane or, perhaps, doing the opposite. One of them involved refreshing the Environmental Protection Agency’s mission page, waiting with only half-heartedly baited breath to see if Administrator Lee Zeldin’s promise to “rebrand” his agency would actually be manifested in written form on a government website.

It has not, as of yet. One might think, then, that months and months of, well, nothing happening might put a damper on the effort. Perhaps a stray click would close a long dormant tab, or a slowed browser would prompt a laptop restart without bothering to reopen the same windows. But no: instead, whatever corner of my brain has decided that this is a worthwhile endeavor has doubled — tripled, quadrupled — down.

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I now have a collection of tabs, grouped using Chrome’s handy organizational feature, into a blue-labeled basket called “check ins.” The EPA’s mission page is in there, still blithely claiming that it wants to “protect human health and the environment” by way of developing and enforcing regulations, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. But there are others as well, elevated to a similar status because some administration move or other rendered them superfluous, or contradictory, or at odds with apparent government priorities. Here they are, my grotesque children:

1. US Census Bureau, Our Censuses: Earlier this month, the president took to his one-man-only social media platform to announce he was demanding a new census be conducted, midstream of the usual 10-year cycle. This is blatantly unconstitutional, of course — and it says so right on the Census Bureau’s page explaining how this all works: “It is mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and takes place every 10 years.” My assumption, then, is that while the obvious Congressional-seats power grab is likely logistically impossible anyway — planning for the 2030 census has already been going for some time now — the administration would at least like to pretend that they are, in fact, allowed to do this. So far, they haven’t bothered.

2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Autism and Vaccines: Page 2 of 9 of the CDC’s “questions and concerns” series surrounding vaccination concerns their nonexistent connection to autism. That faulty connection, of course, which has fueled much of the anti-vax movement over the past two decades, is central to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s ongoing campaign to kill as many people as possible. The CDC page states it clearly, however, with a first subheading: “Vaccines do not cause autism.” It includes further notes that no link has been found between “any vaccine ingredients” and autism spectrum disorder, and goes into some detail. These statements, while profoundly true and supported by decades of science, do not mesh with the Secretary’s brain-cooked worldview. In this case, I keep expected the language of the page to be softened or altered, or for some fabricated caveat or other to penetrate the wording. To date, it remains as published at the end of 2024.

3. Department of Justice, “Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low“: The newest addition to the Tabs of Questionable Sanity, this is a press release from early January of this year. Its title is self-explanatory, and as we covered recently, its conclusion is actually out of date given the further falling crime rates in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has unleashed various federal troops to the streets of the nation’s capital, to be booed and jeered and called fascists and face cold cut projectiles, in service of a fake crime emergency. Various Republican governors — West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Louisiana — have announced they will contribute National Guard troops, ignoring obvious evidence that plenty of their own cities have much higher crime rates than DC. And so I assume that the DOJ — specifically the US Attorney for DC, one of Trump’s Fox-News-to-Cabinet pipeline beneficiaries, Jeanine Pirro — would prefer to erase their own evidence that sings a contrary song to the authoritarian deployment. But as of Tuesday, the crowing press release remains.

Along with the EPA’s page, that makes four such websites, a collection that I could probably add to today if I thought about it, and that I will surely expand soon enough when faced with the next similar outrage. But what to make of the fact that none, so far, have been altered even a tiny bit, as far as I can tell? The more comforting answer is incompetence, that the sort of people who would leave documents relating to a sensitive Trump-Putin summit on the printer at a hotel business center simply haven’t noticed or figured out that they could change some of the public-facing information that runs counter to their stated aims or priorities.

The more likely answer, though, and one that works to illustrate the depths of our collective helplessness at the moment, is that they just don’t care. What difference is it to RFK Jr. if a website under his agency’s auspices says vaccines are safe when through a wide range of maneuvers he can go about making them harder to access, and harder to research and improve? Who cares what a January press release says — the troops are on the streets of DC regardless, and streaming in from red states as well, evidence to the utter lack of need be damned?

This isn’t to say that parts of the administration are above the sort of pettiness that involves removing publicly available and correct information from a website. Various agencies took down years’ worth of real climate science reports, and the Department of Energy replaced them with a hastily and illegally made pile of garbage. Plenty of useful government data and accompanying websites have been disappeared, and more will follow. But my collection of “check ins,” grubbily assembled and stored in a dimly lit terrarium of tabs, is starting to feel emblematic of the degree of impunity Trump’s cheerleading lackeys assume they have. There’s no particular use for a census explanation page, or a rote repetition of statutorily defined agency mission, beyond keeping the public vaguely informed of its government’s stated purposes. If there is one defining characteristic of this particular government, it is the willingness to state one thing, however preposterously far from reality, and do another.