Just as the nation has started to make small advances in addressing racial health disparities, President Donald Trump’s attack on DEI is causing uncertainty for the future of closing racial health gaps. Early this week, the CDC’s Atlanta offices received instructions to avoid using specific race-related terms — despite agency goals to address racial health disparities.

According to The New York Times, an email to CDC researchers listed dozens of “key words” that employees should refrain from using when writing annual goals for performance evaluations, in order to comply with the presidents’ anti-DEI efforts. The list included terms like “health equity,” “race,” “bias,” “disparity,” “culturally appropriate” and “stereotype.”

The email reportedly prompted a follow-up from the CDC’s head offices in Washington claiming that the words are actually still permissible, revealing what promises to be mounting tension between the new leadership of the Health and Human Services Department and, well, every sensible person in the medical world trying to do their job.

While this backtracking may have meant to temporarily quell any heightened discord within the agency, it only deepened the confusion that started when the president began his crusade to remove “wasteful” DEI language from everywhere he could. Because we have, in 2025, just begun to scratch the surface when addressing racial bias, gender, and other types of conscious and subconscious bias in health care, erasing this language will have devastating consequences.

While addressing disparities in the U.S. health care system has been a topic of conversation within Black and brown communities since the early days of Granny Midwives, It took the devastation of Covid to wake up many, many federal officials to the very real present-day biases impacting Black and brown communities throughout the country.

At the height of Covid, not only were minorities hit the hardest, Black Americans were far more likely to both contract or die from the virus than their white counterparts. At the same time, alarms were sounded to bring attention to continued police violence in Black communities, and the increase in Black and brown maternal mortality caused by Covid. The staggering data that proved these issues went viral, serving as a catalyst for new movements to implement DEI across corporate and federal government settings.

This rise in this public awareness also led the CDC to implement a number of initiatives to address racial health disparities since 2020, including generous funding to staff and launch equity initiatives in Black and Latino communities.

Though Trump’s anti-DEI stance has been justified as a way to make the American government less political and better functioning for everyone regardless of race, efforts to silence DEI rhetoric would make solving some of the nation’s most pressing public health issues virtually impossible.

As of right now, The CDC’s website no longer mentions race for the most part. The omissions are “astounding,” David Rosner, a medical historian who co-directs the Center for the History of Ethics and Public Health at Columbia University, told The New York Times.

The policing of language used to develop solutions will not only pause progress, but also dismantle existing initiatives, and ultimately result in the loss of human rights. This is already being observed by disabled and LGBTQ+ Americans, who were immediately impacted by the president’s orders to end federally funded programs that mention accessibility, and the “pausing” of gender-affirming care by some health care institutions. It is only a matter of time before this becomes a norm for individuals across marginalized populations.

These aren’t just words. They’re an acknowledgment of a reality we all desperately need to recognize in order for any kind of progress to be made — and to keep our most vulnerable populations to survive.