The hysteria on the left has reached a fever pitch in recent days, with left-wing "news" outlets and activists losing their minds over a bunch of pages disappearing from government websites.
- New York Times: "Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday"
- NPR: "Trans people, women, people of color are disappearing from government websites"
- CBS News: "Agencies asked to scrub federal government websites to remove diversity-related content"
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: "As health data disappear from government websites, experts push back"
- Democracy Now: "8,000+ Pages from Gov't Websites Taken Offline, Including Crucial Info for Trans and Queer People"
- Washington Post: "Amid 'DEI' purge, Pentagon removes webpage on Iwo Jima flag-raiser"
On and on it goes. You'd think a real-life Winston Smith (who happens to look a lot like Elon Musk) had swept in to rewrite history, sending everything down the Memory Hole.
Let's get a few things straight: First, if you are depending on United States government websites to teach you history, the Founding Fathers are ashamed of you right now. Go read a history book. Read as many as you can get your hands on, including those from different perspectives. Everything our government touches is political. The decisions about which pages to include on government websites are inherently political and change every time there's a new president. Refuse to play the game, and, as the Left says, "educate yourself."
Likewise, don't rely on government websites for medical advice. Who does that?!?! Why would you trust federal bureaucrats over your own doctors? Rule #1 about government is: The government doesn't care about you. (I just made that up, but you know it's true.)
I asked Grok AI just now how many government web pages are in existence, and while it was unable to come up with an exact number, it spat out this:
Without an exact tally from a centralized source (which isn’t publicly maintained), a reasonable ballpark figure based on available information would place the number of U.S. government web pages in the range of 500,000 to 1 million or more, accounting for the breadth of federal content online as of March 20, 2025. This estimate includes active pages but excludes archived or temporarily offline content, which could push the total higher.
That's the point I really want to make. There shouldn't be a million government pages. Imagine the manpower and the cost not only to create and edit those pages but to maintain them over years and decades. The federal government wants to have its finger in every aspect of our lives and would love to be the sole authority on everything, including our health decisions and how we view history.
While I'm enjoying the Left's meltdowns about their favorite web pages "going missing," I would love to see DOGE cut and/or consolidate all those wasteful pages. Sure, let's keep Social Security applications online. And yes, we can keep the U.S. Postal Services's tracking and passport sections open. But do we really need a USPS story about the "Vibrant Leaves" postcard stamps or an article called "Betty White to Smile on New Stamp"?
It's well past time for the federal government to get back to basics.
