Friday, January 20, 2017

Trump to Shut Down White House Office of National AIDS Policy


Well, that didn't take long. The attack on the LGBT community is already under way. Towleroad notes that the White House LGBT page -- whitehouse.gov/lgbt -- has been erased. Also scrubbed are pages dedicated to climate change, civil rights and health care. (They've been archived HERE.) While this may be standard transition stuff, I'm not convinced Trump has plans to ever bring them back given that lots of other pages do take you to up-to-date Trump administration policies, like the one reprimanding people for having the audacity to ask the police to not murder people of color for no reason. Even more disturbing to me is that a source in the HIV/AIDS research community tells me Trump has no plans to staff the Office of National AIDS Policy, whose page has also been disabled. Revisionist LGBT activists should note the office was formed in 1993 -- during the Clinton administration at the height of the plague -- to coordinate government efforts to reduce the number of HIV infections in the United States. Amy Lansky was director during the last year of the Obama administration, and tweeted a goodbye from the staff on Jan. 4. (All three members were political appointees or detailees, so their leaving was normal protocol.) I've had no luck getting anyone to go on the record to confirm what I've been told, but given what we know about the new administration -- Mike Pence in particular -- it seems far more likely that an Office of Conversion Therapy would appear before ONAP is up and running again. Contact me if you know more HERE -- I'd be thrilled to be misinformed.

UPDATE: Lansky reached out to say: "I have no information on what the Trump administration may or may not do with regards to ONAP."


How is this making America great again?


From HERE.


12 comments:

Unknown said...

The ONAP shutdown may be real.

The 'purging' of LGBT from whitehouse.gov isn't really real. Every single thing went away -- defense, tax policy, immigration, everything.

They now have a bare minimum site up -- about 6 pages of issue content total, which appears to be boilerplate rhetoric from their campaign site.

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

@Unknown: Actually every other thing did NOT go away. There are working links on all sorts of topics that take you to current Trump policies, which leads me to believe there is not policy on some of these topics.

Jeffery said...

The Daleks are in control. Destroy, destroy, destroy.

Joseph Morrison said...

Hahaha.. I kinda feel like I'm living in a Dr. Who episode

Unknown said...

Well, the real question is, is it common practice for an entire office to be dismissed when there's a changeover? If so, we can't say this is necessarily a sign for sure.

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

@Dan: I was told Trump shut it down completely.

Unknown said...

privately I've been hearing it's been shut down for good too. Waiting for official info though. Hope it's not true

Eddie Hamilton said...

All of the Obama presidential material is now in custody of the National Archives as of 12 Noon today. It was announced on 1/17.. This is standard protocol and web material is classified as presidential papers.
It is all housed at obamawhitehouse.gov
The historical record is frozen but available.

This transition has other priorities at the moment.
That is what is causing much of the panic in the community
I work in Federal AIDS Policy circles and nothing has been stated about the staus of the office. I think this is premature.

Deaf258 said...

It's back to the Reaganite Era.

Unknown said...

No it's not - major policy sites are not scrubbed. And the labor dept site purposely extracted all LGBT references today After he was sworn in. Please do not minimize the seriousness of this

staciejung said...

Snopes may be correct, literally, but to not replace the automatically scrubbed issues with a new version or to replace them with antithetical statements like, "For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry. President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule," amounts to the same thing. These are not important issues to this administration at best, and issues they are working against at worst.

JimmyD said...

Snopes has/had something to say on the subject.