"RICHMOND - As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to assume the White House on Jan. 20, the federal government is bracing for a massive overhaul in policy – and how it labels issues and individuals.

Potentially limited or wiped from official government websites and documents are references to climate change, "undocumented immigrants" or "non-citizens" in favor of "illegal aliens" and prominent mentions of LGBTQ+ rights, experts say.

Ahead of Trump's first term, researchers expected to see changes that were more subtle – like references to "impacts" versus "effects" of climate change, explained Gretchen Gehrke, Website Monitoring Program Lead at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative.

"And we did see a fair amount of content changes like that, but what we mostly saw was straight up deletion," she said. "We mostly saw massive access reductions, a lot of information suppression.""

David Sherfinski reports for Thomson Reuters Foundation January 7, 2025. [2]