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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo/Alex Brandon).
A group of physicians won a victory against the Trump administration on Tuesday when a judge ordered administrative agencies to restore certain webpages that were removed from public health websites.
On Feb. 4, Doctors for America filed an 18-page lawsuit over the removal of “a broad range of health-related data and other information used every day by health professionals to diagnose and treat patients and by researchers to advance public health.”
Two days later, the plaintiffs moved for a temporary restraining order against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services, asking for a court order that would force the defendants “to restore webpages and datasets.”
Now, a judge sitting in Washington, D.C., has issued that requested temporary restraining order — and in the process ridiculed one of the government’s arguments against such relief.
On Feb. 9, in a defense memo opposing the temporary restraining order, the U.S. Department of Justice argued the plaintiffs were making an incommensurate fuss about the downed webpages.
The DOJ argued that since two of the plaintiffs had linked to some archived copies of certain webpages in their complaint, they had not truly shown that they suffered a legally-recognizable injury. Those links, each filing notes, were courtesy of the Wayback Machine feature available from the Internet Archive, a third-party nonprofit.
“DFA’s own submissions show that much of this very information remains available through archival copies hosted by the Wayback Machine,” the defendants argued.
The defense motion elaborates, at length:
So, for example, if Dr. Liou needs a copy of the “CDC Contraceptive Guidance for Health Care Providers,” it’s only a click away. Or if Dr. Ramachandran wants to review FDA’s draft guidance, “Study of Sex Differences in the Clinical Evaluation of Medical Products,” or CDC’s report, “PrEP for the Prevention of HIV Infection in the U.S.,” she need only bookmark the link in the Complaint. The continued availability of this information belies any claim of “actual” injury.
On Feb. 10, the physicians’ attorneys took issue with this argument in their reply to the defense — saying the government did not appear to understand how the Wayback Machine actually works.
“Defendants’ principal contention seems to be that DFA members have not suffered irreparable harm because they can access some of the removed information on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine,” the reply motion reads. “That argument both misunderstands the Wayback Machine and the reality of DFA members’ work. Because pages archived on the Wayback Machine do not appear as search results, the only way to access an archived page is to go to the Wayback Machine webpage and then to enter the URL of the page one is looking for.”
U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a lengthy memorandum opinion in support of his temporary restraining order. The court, for its part, largely cabined its analysis on injuries attested to by two doctors.
In his opinion, the court notes that doctors Stephanie Liou and Reshma Ramachandran — who sit on the board of plaintiff organization DFA — have both spent substantial amounts of time and energy serving patients without access to CDC and FDA materials and resources they previously relied upon. And, in some instances, some medical help has been halted altogether due to the lack of those resources, the court noted.
“These are injuries in fact,” Bates writes. “These doctors’ time and effort are valuable, scarce resources, and being forced to spend them elsewhere makes their jobs harder and their treatment less effective.”
As for the Wayback Machine argument, the judge relegates the entirety of that analysis to a footnote that credits the arguments made by the physicians.
From the court’s opinion:
Defendants contend that the removal of the webpages does not constitute irreparable harm because DFA members can still access some of the removed webpages through the Wayback Machine, an archival website. The Court is not persuaded. The Wayback Machine does not capture every webpage, and there is no information to suggest that it has archived each removed webpage. Additionally, pages archived on the Wayback Machine do not appear on search engines. In other words, a particular archived webpage is only viewable to a provider if the provider knows that the Wayback Machine exists and had recorded the pre-removal URL of the requested webpage.
“Here, DFA has ‘show[n] its members will suffer irreparable harm if’ defendants’ removal of the webpages and datasets ‘is not enjoined’ at this stage,” Bates concluded.
In response to the physicians’ court-ordered victory, Trump’s designated head of DOGE Elon Musk criticized the judge overseeing the case in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
“Judges as website editors!?” he tweeted. “We should at least ATTEMPT to fire this junky jurist.”
The government has until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday to comply with the court’s order — and restore the web pages mentioned in the lawsuit. By Valentine’s Day, the government must work with the plaintiffs to restore any additional webpages they “rely on to provide medical care and that defendants removed or substantially modified.”
