Trump Orders NASA to Purge All Mentions of Women in Leadership On Its Websites

"This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request."

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As President Donald Trump's anti-DEI agenda comes to bear on NASA, we're getting a revealing look at what his administration considers to be too woke: women.

In a directive sent out just days after Trump's inauguration, NASA personnel were commanded to excise all mentions of anything "specifically targeting" women on the space agency's public websites, 404 Media reports.

"Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today," the directive reads. "This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request."

The list of verboten terms includes "DEIA," "accessibility," "indigenous people," "environmental justice," and finally: "anything specifically targeting women," such as "women in leadership, etc."

Speaking anonymously to 404, a NASA employee confirmed that leadership were serious about the changes.

"We were absolutely required to scrub all DEI related or DEI adjacent topics and terms from all external websites by 5pm the 22nd," the employee said.

Face of Change

To lead the agency down this path, Trump hand picked Janet Petro as the space agency's acting head — a nomination that's reportedly surprised even NASA officials — which makes her the first woman to serve as the agency's adminstrator.

"These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination," Petro wrote in a memo about the agency's termination of diversity programs.

That's funny, because when Petro was the director of the Kennedy Space Center, she said this in a 2021 interview: "At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success. The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment," Petro said.  "KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation," she added.

You could argue that Petro's hand was forced, but the fact that she accepted the job knowing full well what Trump's agenda was, not to mention her about-face on the issue, suggests she's doing it all with mercenary intent.

On its surface, these policies might seem to contradict some of Trump's campaign rhetoric. As part of his anti-woke crusade, Trump has frequently vowed to "protect women" by, among other things, cracking down on transgender rights. So is this what protecting women looks like — minimizing any outward gestures about their presence at NASA and elsewhere in government?

Apparently yes. Call it hypocritical, but it's also just plain old paternalism.

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