Juliet Eilperin

Health and Human Services Department officials confirmed that they had singled out a handful of words that should be avoided in the upcoming budget process, but said they had not blocked employees from using them outright. A department spokesman further said that the guidance came from within HHS, not from the Office of Management and Budget. HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd said that employees had misinterpreted the guidance. “HHS and its agencies have not banned, prohibited or forbidden employees from using certain words,” said Lloyd.

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in official documents being prepared for the 2018 budget. Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden terms at a meeting Dec 14 with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing.

The Trump administration has removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses.

Some of the information relates to enforcement actions taken by federal agencies against companies and other employers. By lessening access, the administration is sheltering them from the kind of “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior, according to digital experts, activists and former Obama administration officials. The administration has also removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies that the White House no longer embraces.

“The President has made a commitment that his Administration will absolutely follow the law and disclose any information it is required to disclose,” said White House spokeswoman Kelly Love. The White House takes its ethics and conflict of interest rules seriously,” Love added, “and requires all employees to work closely with ethics counsel to ensure compliance. Per the President’s Executive Order, violators will be held accountable by the Department of Justice.”

But Norman Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, said the changes have undermined the public’s ability to hold the federal government accountable. “The Trump administration seems determined to utilize a larger version of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility to cover the entire administration,” said Eisen, now a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program.

In his first public appearance since leaving the White House in January, former president Barack Obama told young leaders that "special interests dominate the debates in Washington" and that he had failed to realize his "aspirational" goal of uniting Americans in red and blue states. "That was an aspirational comment," the former president said of his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, prompting laughter from the audience at the University of Chicago.

He added that when talking to individual Americans from different political backgrounds, you learn that "there’s a lot more that people have in common" than it would appear. "But, obviously, it’s not true when it comes to our politics and our civic life." Obama, who has kept a relatively low public profile since the end of his second term, did not mention President Trump once during the 90-minute event. But he said he was determined to galvanize younger Americans to do more politically because they were the ones best positioned to bridge the current political divide.

President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to create an infrastructure “task force” that will help carry out the ambitious federal spending program he intends to undertake upon taking office, according to several individuals briefed on his plans.

Key members of Trump’s team — including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon, senior adviser Stephen Miller and Gary Cohn, whom Trump has tapped to head the National Economic Council — are all involved in the discussions. The task force head is “not Cabinet level,” but would play a critical role in coordinating among federal, state and local officials as well as private investors as the new administration prepares to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into projects across the country. The task force would also have to help identify what qualifies as infrastructure, a word that has been used to describe everything from roads to broadband, from bike trails to electric transmission lines.