Upon taking office, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the removal of all mentions of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from departments and agencies throughout the federal government. At the the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), that order may have gone too far when the agency destroyed and deleted 18 publications on workplace safety practices.
According to the news website Popular Information, the overzealous destruction of the safety manuals used keyword searches but failed to take in to account the context of word usage.
“For example, one of the purged publications is ‘OSHA Best Practices for Protecting EMS Responders During Treatment and Transport of Victims of Hazardous Substance Releases,’” writes Popular Information.
“An archived version of that publication details the steps employers need to take to protect their EMS responders from becoming additional victims while on the front line of medical response,” the publication explains.
Further, it notes the manual “does not reference DEI. However the words
‘diversity’ and ‘diverse’ are used in a context that have nothing to do with race or gender.”
What could be a life-saving manual has now been removed from circulation at the agency becuase it references a “diversity of state-specific certification, training, and regulatory requirements” for “EMS agencies” and “diverse conditions under which EMS responders could work.”
It also states that “EMS responders are a diverse group” and states that “risks vary with their primary and secondary roles.”
In another now deleted manual, “Guidelines for Nursing Homes: Ergonomics for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders,” page 10, states, “development of MSDs may be related to genetic causes, gender, age, and other factors.” The single use of the word “gender” appears to have flagged the publication for deletion and destruction.
The list goes on. Only one of the 18 publications, “Restroom Access for Transgender Workers, Best Practices,” appears to have anything to do with DEI.
That publication details federal and state legal precedent recognizing “employees should be allowed to use the restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.” All of the targeted publications, however, include a keyword related to diversity or gender.
The National Security Agency (NSA) did a “Big Delete” too. That agency banned 27 words including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.”
According to a Washington Post analysis, “words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies. A page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ ‘diverse collections,’ removed the word ‘diverse.’”
The dangers of using a simple keyword search to mass delete was particularly evident when data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was found to be missing. According to VOX, information covering everything from obesity to the bird flu was affected by the purge.
Luckily, reports VOX, “the removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.”
Much of the CDC data was restored, however, experts in the field say not all of the supporting papers and documents have been.