The finger was already on the scale when this report was commissioned,” says Kellan Baker, a health services researcher who serves as executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute for Health Research and Policy. Soon after taking office in January, Trump gave HHS a 90-day deadline to publish the review in an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which claimed without evidence that medical professionals in the United States “
are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children” and threatened to revoke federal funding from hospital clinics that provide gender-affirming care to minors.