Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

I guess the punchline is the NIH won't be funding research then either?

Yes, this same guy is helping "to cut more than 40% from NIH’s 2026 budget and pare its 27 institutes and centers down to just eight." - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-director-def...

He has already fired over a thousand NIH employees and frozen or cancelled billions in grants in his first couple months on the job.

While we're talking about NIH, here's a fun game: try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box. Play around and see how many Forbidden Words you can discover!

Typing "gender" in a phrase such as "sexual gender", "age and gender" works.

Yes you can also just put "gender" in quotes and it works. Or you can spell it wrong - transgender is blocked, but you can do transgendr and it will correct your spelling and return results. Of course, some of the pages it returns have been deleted.

Presumably this was implemented by some developers trying to do the absolute bare minimum to comply with the absurd orders they were given.

It's entertaining to see the early 2000s name "disemvoweling" return with a new purpose!

So it's not just censorship it's bottom of the barrel dumb censorship too.

The anti-intellectual crusade isn't hiring the best and the brightest to man the trenches, but they don't have to.

> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box

Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.

It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.

For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.

Trump's social media is literally named "Truth" Social. Incredibly Orwellian. I don't understand how people thought him being president a second time was a good idea.

I've found so far: 'gender', 'diversity', 'equity', 'inclusion', as expected. Not: 'equality', 'socioeconomic', 'minority', 'ableism'.

Spanish is uncensored: Not censored: 'diversidad', 'equidad', 'genero' Censored: 'inclusion' (ha, same word as in english, duh) (Also 'inclusión', surprisingly)

It really doesn't seem to be a broad sweeping thing, mostly just 'DEI' terms forwarded in apache or something, which makes sense. That gender is included seems to be an outlier. (Though would be curious to see if you found any others)

'pregnant people', 'transgender', 'nonbinary', and 'racism' are others I found

Very interestingly, I tried to write "gender" and mistakenly wrote "gendea". The search engine, trying to be helpful, gave me: "No results found for 'gendea'. Showing results for gender"

And voilà, I just got 1666 (heh) results free from the censors!

Note that the top result has actually been deleted though: https://www.nih.gov/nih-style-guide/inclusive-gender-neutral...

If you had an NIH grant, and then they cancelled the grant, does that count?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com