Fact Check: NASA scrubbed its website to remove mentions of minorities and inclusion
Claim:
NASA has removed mentions of women and minorities from its websites.
Rating:
What's True:
The space agency's website had been scrubbed and changed to remove references to inclusion, diversity, gender and minorities, among other terms. It had also been modified to remove Spanish translations "per Fed mandate," according to NASA website change logs on GitHub. Further, a feature about one woman, geologist Wendy Bohon, had been removed from the website two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump took office. However …
What's False:
… a page about women at NASA still appeared on the website as of this writing.
Two weeks after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, rumors spread that NASA had scrubbed its website to remove references to women.
For example, a Reddit post (archived) that had 41,000 upvotes claimed mentions of "women in leadership" had been taken off the space agenct's website:
NASA Ordered to Remove Anything About 'Women in Leadership' From Its Websites: Report by u/dem676 in space
The claim also appeared on X.
This rumor stemmed from a Feb. 4 report by 404 Media, an investigative news outlet focused on technology and the internet, including privacy issues and cybercrime. Based on an interview with an unidentified NASA employee and a verification of NASA's public GitHub repositories, 404 Media reported that the agency had been told to scrub the site for mentions of "anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)."
404 Media said it had obtained a Jan. 22, 2025, memo sent to NASA employees that insisted on the urgency of the request (emphasis ours):
Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5 pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on.
DEIA
Diversity (in context of DEIA)
Equity (" ")
Inclusion (" ")
Accessibility (" ")
MSI
Minority Serving Institution
Indigenous People
EEJ
EJ
Environmental Justice
Underrepresented groups/people
Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)
Snopes looked for copies of the memo and contacted NASA asking for one, and we will update this report should we obtain one.
The claim spread further when geologist Wendy Bohon shared on LinkedIn (in a now-deleted post) and on Bluesky (archived) that a feature NASA published about her in 2023 had been removed:
(Google Search)
(Bluesky / Wendy Bohon)
In an email exchange, Bohon shared the archived version of the feature. Using the original url, we also landed on a "page not found" error.
"I do know that the link was live at 8 p.m. on Saturday and when I checked it again after seeing the article from 404 [Media] on Tuesday, the feature had been removed," Bohon said in an email, referring to Feb. 1 and 4.
Bohon also shared a screen capture of the NASA landing page on which the article used to appear, titled "Women at NASA." A search for this specific page revealed it still existed, but it did not refer to the feature on Bohon.
404 Media also identified GitHub repositories belonging to NASA and published screen captures of them. GitHub is an open platform on which software and web developers can store and track their code. They typically save backups of the old code when they make changes so as to identify where things go wrong in case the new code fails. While Snopes had not found the exact change logs of the repositories published by 404 Media, we found others that reflected similar changes in the week of Jan. 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated. NASA GitHub repositories sorted by modification date indicate that many changes on the website occurred that week.
For example, the change log for the code of conduct of the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation showed that the developer had removed specific references to "age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation," as well as "diverse, inclusive, and healthy communities." The sections in red show the removed lines, while the green lines show what was added:
(GitHub / NASA)
A change log for NASA's website on the planet's "vitals" showed similar modifications.
Further, a change log for NASA's GeneLab website showed that translation of certain terms to Spanish had been removed during that same week "per Fed mandate":
(GitHub / NASA)
In its reporting, 404 Media has used GitHub repositories to track changes made to government websites.
Jack Izzo contributed reporting.
Cole, Samantha. 'Workers at NASA Told to "Drop Everything" to Scrub Mentions of Indigenous People, Women from Its Websites'. 404 Media, 4 Feb. 2025, https://www.404media.co/nasa-dei-drop-everything-executive-order/.
Koebler, Jason. 'GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time'. 404 Media, 23 Jan. 2025, https://www.404media.co/github-is-showing-the-trump-administration-scrubbing-government-web-pages-in-real-time/.
'Modifying Content per Fed Mandate · Nasa/GeneLab-Training@c071692'. GitHub, https://github.com/nasa/GeneLab-Training/commit/c0716920ec667f49f090aaef788a714deac3e973. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
'NASA'. GitHub, https://github.com/nasa. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
'Simplify Code of Conduct · Nasa/EMIT-Data-Resources@5bede8c'. GitHub, https://github.com/nasa/EMIT-Data-Resources/commit/5bede8ca7de77351143f0041ca9cce6c5231d23c. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
'Simplify Code of Conduct · Nasa/VITALS@bce4604'. GitHub, https://github.com/nasa/VITALS/commit/bce4604be9efa122ecdee91ab3acdebad2ba938b. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
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