American Association of Dental Editors & Journalists www.aadej.org 6 FROM THE PRESIDENT In the curated chaos of my study, every paper had its place — even if that place was amid stacks of journals or within articles and files that overflowed from my desk onto the floor. For years, my wife’s solution was simply to keep the door closed, quarantining my cluttered archive so that she and visitors were protected from witnessing the mess. Eventually, she carved out her own workspace in another room where she could keep her sense of order. Despite appearances, I could pinpoint any document within seconds. That was until last December when she launched a stealth cleaning campaign while I was away. Without my input on what was truly valuable and how things could be organized, I now have no idea which randomly packed box has what I’m looking for and what may have been thrown out. But the anxiety and sense of loss from her well-intended purge pales in contrast to what researchers, authors, and the public face as federal agencies systematically scrub freely available resources, driven by political directives restricting what information they can publish. The CDC and other federal agencies wrestled with political leaders about using words like evidence-based and sciencebased,1 while landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources and adaptation tools went dark. This followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications, instructing website managers across the agency to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change.”2 Instruction from CDC’s associate director for science resulted in vanishing CDC websites and datasets related to a range of vital health topics including immunization, race or ethnic diversity, contraception, sexually transmitted infections and HIV treatment, and sexual and reproductive healthcare.3 In February, the British Medical Journal wrote “The US was considered a world leader in public health and research,” further noting that “It is absurd that the Safeguarding our Literature Christopher J. Smiley, DDS, CDE, President, AADEJ
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