We Need Sound Policy Informed by Science. The Trump Administration Is Undermining it.

 The Equation Read More 

This week, the Trump White House issued guidance on how the federal government should implement its so-called “Gold Standard Science” executive order. Accompanying the guidance was an editorial in the magazine Science from the administration’s Science Advisor to the President Michael Kratsios (who also heads the Office for Science and Technology Policy), entitled, “Sound policy demands sound science.”

In the editorial, Mr. Kratsios claims to be addressing longstanding issues in the scientific community around strengthening scientific rigor, reproducibility, and integrity. I can assure him that I—and many in the scientific community—would love to have that conversation. But this ain’t it. 

The executive order, and the White House’s messaging, are couched in rhetoric that the scientific community will find familiar and resonant. In fact, much of the new guidance is remarkably UNremarkable, in that it restates many of the goals that the scientific community has for increasing the rigor, accessibility, and transparency of science produced and used in federal contexts.

But behind this facade is concerning language that sets the stage for the administration to undermine science-based policy—the same playbook followed by the first Trump administration (and Congress before that, and the tobacco industry before that). 

I would be delighted to work across political aisles, scientific disciplines, and public and private sectors to tackle these challenges in science. Indeed, this was part of my job when I worked in the White House. Directed by an executive order in the first week, the Biden-Harris White House set out to improve public trust in science by strengthening scientific integrity across the government. Over the subsequent years, we made important progress on this goal: expanding comprehensive scientific integrity policies and officers to some 30 federal agencies, creating better processes, and installing scientific integrity infrastructure to empower science and scientists to be protected in government activities.

This is simply good policy no matter which party is in power. Science has been politicized by both major political parties; there is nothing inherently partisan about protecting the people and processes that ensure accurate information and scientific advice inform government decisions.

I’m immensely proud of what we accomplished—AND there was much more left to be done. When they took office, the Trump administration had the opportunity to carry on this effort. They could have continued this work across agencies by developing more detailed processes, conducting surveys on implementation, tackling nuanced emerging issues like other modes of science including community-engaged research, and integrating new technologies into existing policies and practices—activities that would have brought the federal science enterprise to new heights.

Wouldn’t the Science Advisor to the President, who wishes to “reinforce scientific rigor and excellence,” consider it a gift to inherit such a project to improve upon? This was a golden opportunity to improve federal science. Instead, we got a golden facade, behind which lurk threats to the production and use of science in federal spaces altogether. 

If there were any doubts about the political nature of this effort, we can look to the executive order itself, which explicitly and specifically directs agencies to kill the policies they developed during the years of the Biden-Harris administration. This suggests to me that the order is less about improving science, and more about politics. 

Leaving aside the bizarre tone of Mr. Kratsios’ editorial in which he complains that the scientific community didn’t react the way he wanted to the executive order, the content of his editorial and the guidance released by his office reveal several new concerning elements. Most alarmingly, the guidance includes, “support for adversarial collaborations where teams with differing hypotheses design studies to rigorously test results, minimizing confirmation bias.”  This is a nod to the climate science “red team blue team” exercise, in which “climate skeptics” are given equal standing to climate scientists as they unnecessarily debate. This is a tactic for undermining climate science in policy settings that received widespread pushback from the scientific community in the first Trump administration.

I desperately wish we were talking about improving the production and use of science in federal decisions. There is so much legitimate work to be done collectively among leaders in the scientific community. We could draw lessons from different sectors and levels of government. We could incorporate the latest social science research on how best science can inform policy decisions. We could create bespoke policies and procedures for the many unique government contexts in which scientific information informs decisions.

Instead, we’ve gotten high-level rhetoric that conflates science and policy, paints a broad brush of platitudes without the policy progress to match, and threatens to weaken federal science.

We must instead strive to have the tough conversations that are needed to improve science in federal policy settings. Let’s get to that hard and necessary work.