President Donald Trump issued two quick blows to public health transparency this week, and the secrecy could put lives at risk.

Health agency communications go dark

The Trump administration has told federal health agencies to stop communicating with the public for an undisclosed amount of time. The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Health and Human Services Department were among those targeted by the blackout, which prevents sharing “health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts.”

This will impact agencies’ ability to share information with health care providers, send alerts on virus outbreaks, issue mortality reports, and more.

The effort mirrors those taken immediately after Trump took office in 2017 to force environmental agencies to drastically reduce their communications with the public — and members of Congress.

The Trump administration should immediately release the memoranda shared with health agencies so the public and lawmakers can understand the rationale and scope of the measures.

Lifesaving NIH funding in jeopardy, databases in danger

The Trump administration also abruptly canceled the NIH’s scientific study sections this week. NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research and these review boards approve grant and fellowship applications for 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions.

Past NIH-funded research has led to more effective treatments of a wide range of cancers, childhood leukemia, schizophrenia, depression, and stroke, and made it easier for doctors to see if someone is more likely to suffer from dementia.

If the pause is prolonged — or permanent — it will interrupt or derail similar lifesaving research.

It is irresponsible for the Trump administration to indefinitely pause these grant review groups, and it should inform the public immediately when it plans to resume them.

Important NIH databases may also be in danger under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is tapped to lead NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and wants to drastically reshape public health.

The first Trump administration wiped nearly 40,000 datasets from data.gov within a few months. Journalists, archivists, and research institutions would be wise to assume NIH databases may face a similar fate and should begin archiving these critical resources immediately. (Here and here would be good places to start.)

We’ve seen this before

These dual transparency threats of gagging agency communications and possibly removing important information from their websites are precedented.

An indispensable project from the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative completed during the first Trump administration shows how environmental agency websites were censored after forced communications blackouts.

As a result, the public and policymakers lost access to information, making it more difficult for all levels of government to prepare for and respond to climate change disasters.

We cannot let the same secrecy maneuvers threaten the quality of medical research and health care.