Sometime in the month of December 2017, somewhere in the bowels of the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington, D.C., a
high-level appointee of the Trump
administration moved to take ideological control of the agency’s
budget-writing process. This official presented a directive to the
agency’s departments, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC),
listing seven words that were not to be used in budget preparation. If
they were, they would be flagged and the document sent back for
“correction.” The seven “forbidden” words are: “vulnerable,”
“entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and
“science-based.”