A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Food and Drug Administration and other federal health agencies to restore websites that were removed in response to executive orders from President Donald Trump, writing that the move harmed underprivileged Americans.

District Judge John Bates ordered the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Health and Human Services to restore the removed websites listed in the lawsuit by midnight Tuesday, including sites on diversity and the study of sex differences in clinical trials. As of Wednesday, the pages had been restored.

“Finally, it bears emphasizing who ultimately bears the harm of defendants’ actions: everyday Americans, and most acutely, underprivileged Americans, seeking healthcare,” Bates wrote in his opinion. If doctors cannot provide people with the care they need within their scheduled time, “there is a chance that some individuals will not receive treatment, including for severe, life-threatening conditions.”

The FDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An HHS spokesperson declined to comment.

Doctors for America filed the lawsuit on Feb. 4 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, noting that the FDA removed pages without notice on diversity action plans for clinical trials and on the study of sex differences in the clinical evaluation of medical products. Several sites were also removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including pages on HIV testing, contraceptive guidance for healthcare providers and the social vulnerability index, which provides datasets to help public health officials with emergency planning.

“The order puts a stop, at least temporarily, to the irrational removal of vital health information from public access,” Zach Shelley, an attorney with consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, who represented the plaintiffs, wrote in an email. “We are happy that doctors, public health officials, and researchers will have access to the information they need to keep us all healthy.” 

Webpages were removed following a Jan. 29 memorandum from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requiring agency heads by Jan. 31 to “terminate any [agency programs] that promote or inculcate gender ideology” and “[t]ake down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology,” according to the complaint.

The memorandum was in response to a Jan. 20 executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” that directed agencies to use the term “sex” and not “gender” in federal policies and documents. 

Doctors for America, in the complaint, wrote that the removal of the webpages “deprives researchers of access to information that is necessary for treating patients, for developing clinical studies that produce results that accurately reflect the effects treatments will have in clinical practice, and for developing practices and policies that protect the health of vulnerable populations and the country as a whole.”

In Tuesday’s order, Bates also granted a motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent the HHS, the CDC and the FDA from removing or substantially modifying other webpages and datasets in response to the OPM memorandum. He also ordered that the agencies work with Doctors for America to identify other resources that have been removed or substantially modified, and to restore those pages by Feb. 14. 

Several other FDA pages with removed content include:

• Annual reports for the Center for Devices and Radiological Health
• The CDRH’s strategic priorities for 2022-2025
• A January draft guidance on the evaluation of sex-specific and gender-specific data in medical device clinical studies
• Pages on CDRH’s Health of Women program, clinical trial diversity and advancing clinical trial participation for the LBGTQIA+ community

The FDA has also removed several videos from its YouTube channel, including videos on sickle cell disease in women, COVID-19 vaccines and women, a webinar on polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis and management, and videos from a 2018 event on participation of women in cardiovascular disease clinical trials.