By Tim Fitzsimons

With just over a year left in President Donald Trump's first term, another late-breaking news item barely made waves: The Interior Department — which manages the majority of the federal government's public lands — deleted "sexual orientation" from its anti-discrimination guidelines, as HuffPost first reported last week. The removal was just the latest in a nearly three-year-long effort to strip mention of LGBTQ people from the executive branch bureaucracy.

Reports of such changes began the day Trump assumed office, when LGBTQ content was deleted from the White House, State Department and Labor Department websites within "minutes" of his having been sworn into office, according to GLAAD, a national LGBTQ advocacy group.

Since then, drip by drip, other parts of the federal government have had their online content trimmed to omit mention of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.

Compounding the confusion, LGBTQ advocates sued to see Justice Department LGBTQ policy documents and a Justice Department employee resource group complained in an open letter about discrimination in the department. Soon after, in April, Attorney General William Barr demonstrated support for the Justice Department's many LGBTQ employees, even as he directed the effort to dismantle federal LGBTQ protections before the Supreme Court. Read more via NBC