Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration say they were told to stop using certain words in external communications, including “woman,” “disabled,” and “elderly,” according to a report.
Two FDA scientists told Reuters that a file titled “Prohibited Words” showing a list of banned terms was circulated at the agency over the last week.
“I don’t understand why we can’t use a word like ‘woman,’” one FDA source who received the list told Reuters. “The words on the list would make it almost impossible to do our jobs.”
The list, which was obtained by Reuters, includes the words “underrepresented,” “underserved,” “understudied,” “sex,” “identity,” “diverse,” “women,” “woman,” “promote,” “definition,” “continuum,” “ideology,” “self-assessed,” “special populations,” “elderly,” and “disabled.”
Neither of the scientists nor their managers knew where the list, which is not accompanied by an explanation, had originated.
The FDA is one of the federal agencies that has seen mass firings as a result of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s avowed effort to purge DEI values from the government.
The effort forced health agencies, including the FDA, to scrub all mentions of “gender” from their websites—although a federal judge has ordered the agencies to restore any pages with healthcare resources.
A spokesperson for the White House told the Reuters that the list was not accurate.
He suggested officials at the FDA might have put the list together after misinterpreting Trump’s executive order against “gender ideology.”
While that set of words is not banned, the spokesperson said that to comply with the order the FDA should not be using words such as “gender,” “inclusion,” “identity,” “diversity,” “inter,” “intersex,” “equity,” “equitable,” “transgender,” and “trans,” Reuters reported.
An FDA spokesperson told Reuters that there is no official list of banned words at the agency, but declined to comment on the words pointed to by the White House spokesperson.
The White House told Reuters that more than 1,000 out of the FDA’s 20,000 employees had been fired as a part of the DEI purge.
