At a dinner party in Kalorama on Saturday night, someone asked — halfway through the second bottle, which is when the interesting questions always arrive — whether any of us had actually tried to look up the CDC’s page on maternal mortality that afternoon. Three of us had. None of us had found it. My friend Eliza, who has spent twenty years in public health and is constitutionally incapable of saying anything in a rising tone, set down her wineglass and said, very quietly, that the page had been there on Thursday. By Friday, it had been what she called ‘reviewed.’ By Saturday, it had been what the rest of us would call gone.
I want to be careful here, because I have been around Washington long enough to know that every administration rearranges the furniture when it moves in, and every opposition columnist treats the rearrangement as the fall of the Republic. Websites get updated. Priorities shift. Someone in a basement office at HHS decides the landing page needs a refresh and a whole administration’s worth of bar charts quietly migrate to a subfolder nobody will ever find again. That is ordinary. That is boring. That is not what is happening right now.
What is happening right now is that entire pages — on climate, on vaccines, on gender, on demographic data the federal government has been collecting since before any of us were born — are being pulled down, in response to executive orders, with the efficiency of a hotel housekeeper stripping a bed. And the reaction from most of the capital has been the reaction you’d expect from a town that long ago decided its highest civic virtue was not making a scene at brunch.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some of the current Cabinet has been shaving, called me on Sunday morning in the particular flat voice she uses when she is furious and trying not to be. She wanted to know if I understood — really understood — what it means, as a matter of basic recordkeeping, to delete a government webpage. Not to revise it. Not to archive it. To delete it. She said the word four times in a row, the way you say a word when you are testing whether it has stopped meaning anything.
The official line, from the people whose job it is to produce official lines, is that these are simply policy pages being brought into alignment with new directives. Fine. I will accept, for the sake of argument, that ‘alignment’ is a word grown adults are allowed to use without laughing. But a dataset is not a policy. A mortality chart is not a directive. The number of Americans who died of a given cause in a given year is not a position paper that a new administration gets to edit because it preferred a different outcome.
I spoke this week with Dr. Helena Marchetti, a records-management scholar at a university I’ll let her identify herself at, who told me something I have not been able to stop turning over. ‘The instinct in democratic governance,’ she said, ‘is to add context to the record. The instinct in authoritarian governance is to subtract from it. We are watching, in real time, which instinct the American federal bureaucracy defaults to under pressure.’ She said this, by the way, while waiting for a sandwich.
You will notice that I am not naming the executive orders in question, and that is deliberate, because the specific orders are almost beside the point. The orders will be challenged. Some will be rewritten. Some will be quietly allowed to expire the way these things always are. What will not be un-done is the muscle memory this moment is building inside the agencies themselves — the new understanding, at the GS-13 level, that the safest thing to do with an inconvenient page is to take it down first and litigate the principle never.
At the same dinner party, a lobbyist whose clients I will describe only as bipartisan leaned across the table and told me, with the affection of a man settling in to explain the weather, that I was being hysterical. The pages weren’t gone, he said. They were on the Wayback Machine. Somebody had screenshotted them. A nonprofit in Toronto was mirroring everything. He delivered this as reassurance. I watched him deliver it as reassurance. I understood, in that moment, that we had arrived at the stage of the decline at which a sitting adult in this city can say, out loud, that it’s fine the United States government is erasing its own records because Canadians are keeping a copy.
This is the part of the column where I am supposed to note, bravely, that both parties have done versions of this before. Fine. Both parties have done versions of this before. The Bush-era EPA shuffled climate language. The Obama administration pulled down pages nobody misses. The first Trump administration had its own enthusiastic relationship with the delete key. I mention this only because I refuse to give the current crop of defenders the satisfaction of pretending I haven’t heard the whataboutism coming. I have. It arrives, as always, pre-chilled.
But there is a difference between a page being revised and a page being memory-holed, and any adult who has spent five minutes in this town knows which one is which. The test is simple. Does the previous version live somewhere the public can find it, with a note explaining what changed and why? Or has it been dropped down a shaft and covered with sod? We are, right now, getting a lot more sod than shafts should require.
What unsettles me is not the deletions themselves. What unsettles me is how quickly the rest of the apparatus — the congressional offices, the trade associations, the think tanks whose entire stated purpose is institutional memory — decided the appropriate posture was a small, apologetic shrug. My colleague Eliza told me she’d written to two senators’ staffs about the public health pages. One wrote back with a form letter about ‘executive prerogative.’ The other didn’t write back at all. This is what civic cowardice looks like at the staff level: a form letter and a silence, both billed to the taxpayer.
I have been writing this column, in one form or another, for thirty years, and the thing I have learned about American democratic backsliding is that it is almost never announced. It is almost always administrative. It arrives not as a jackboot but as a content management ticket, marked low priority, assigned to an intern, closed out by Friday. By the time anyone notices, the question is no longer whether the page existed. The question is whether you can prove it did, and whether the people you would need to prove it to still think proof is the kind of thing that matters.
So I will end where I always end, which is by warning you that I do not like where this is going, and by noting that the people who should be sounding the alarm are instead refreshing their own bios. A country that permits its government to quietly delete its own past is a country that has already decided, without voting on it, what kind of future it plans to tolerate. Judy is right to be furious. Eliza is right to be quiet. And the lobbyist at dinner is right about one thing only: somebody in Toronto has a copy. I would prefer, as a matter of national dignity, that we didn’t have to ask them for it.