GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time

You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches. 

18F is a much-hyped government agency within the General Services Administration that was founded under the Obama Administration after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. It more or less had the specific goal of attracting Silicon Valley talent to the federal government to help the government innovate and make many of its websites and digital services suck less. It is one of the “cooler” federal agencies, and has open sourced many of its projects on GitHub.

GitHub is a website for open source development that shows changes across different “commits,” or changes to code and documentation. In the first days of the Trump administration, 18F’s commit list is full of change logs detailing the administration’s attempts to destroy the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

The changes show that in the last 48 hours, 18F has edited text and wholesale deleted both internal and external web pages about, for example “Inclusive behaviors,” “healthy conflict and constructive feedback,” “DEIA resources,” and “Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” It deleted a webpage about “psychological safety” (which now 404s) deleted all information about the “DE&I leads” at the agency, as well as language for employees that said “Anyone who has issues or concerns related to inclusion or equity in the 18F engineering chapter should feel empowered to reach out to the DE&I Leads.” It has deleted, in various places, the word “inclusion,” as well as the term “affinity groups.” 

It also deleted an internal Slack Bot called “Inclusion Bot,” which is described as being “integrated into Slack and passively listens for words or phrases that have racist, sexist, ableist, or otherwise exclusionary or discriminatory histories or backgrounds. When it hears those words, it privately lets the writer know and offers some suggested alternatives.” 

It has also notably deleted information intended for improving accessibility for blind and visually impaired employees, which asked employees to use “visual descriptions” when introducing themselves on Zoom meetings.

In a hiring document, the language “Teams should consider factors of equity and complexity of the research when determining compensation for participants on their project” has been changed to “team should consider other factors or complexity of the research.”

The Trump administration has not tried to hide that it is trying to delete web pages and employee information across the government. But seeing the change logs pop up as they’re happening on GitHub shows exactly how these changes are being done and how they’re rolling out.