A Not So Happy Anniversary: A Year of Deceptive Science “Standards”
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Saturday, May 23rd marked a year since President Trump signed an executive order (EO) to “restore” so-called “gold standard science.” On the surface, the language and title of the order sounded promising. But to science policy nerds like me, the EO—and the actions the administration has taken to implement it—are ominous.
To state things plainly: this executive order and the initiative it kicked off have weakened scientific integrity (SI) policies and protections across the federal government. SI policies help support the ability of scientists to work independently and speak about their work honestly. They prohibit political appointees from altering, suppressing, or hiding research findings to serve some political, financial, or personal agenda. The goal of SI policies is to give policymakers the whole, unfiltered story when they’re developing legislation and regulation, helping them create effective, evidence-informed policies to protect people and the planet.
When you think about how much we’ve learned as a society from conducting scientific research—how to cure life-threatening diseases; to protect ourselves and our communities from pollution and toxic chemicals; to predict and prepare communities for extreme weather events—I hope we can all agree that scientists should be able to do their jobs without political interference.
There’s nothing to celebrate about a year of the Trump administration’s duplicitous “gold standard science” campaign. Rather, I want to highlight what has been lost because of this administration’s hostility to actual science and the people who carry it out, and the loss of critical, evidence-informed safeguards that were created to protect federal science from politicization. We don’t have to accept this—and you can help.
The most realistic way to think about the EO and its directives is as a smoke screen. The EO uses concepts and terms well-known and accepted in the scientific community, like “transparent,” “reproducible,” and “falsifiable,” to make it seem like the administration is supporting science. But this language cynically hides the reality that the Trump administration is undermining science in many ways.
- The EO was signed against the backdrop of a sky-high number of attacks on science, a number that continues to grow. At the time the EO was signed, researchers at UCS had recorded 327 attacks on science (instances of political interference with scientific work). Almost a year later, the administration has racked up an additional 247 attacks; as of April 30th, 2026, we’ve recorded 574 total attacks on science.
- Under the guise of encouraging data transparency, the EO directed agency heads to make public the data, models, and source code associated with scientific information the agency would produce or use to inform policies (except as prohibited by law or policies that protect sensitive personal or business information). This same language has been weaponized for decades by different industry groups, including the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry, who oppose public health regulations. In practice, this would increase the time, expense, and inefficiency of producing scientific information, and promote an idea that scientific analyses can’t inform policy decisions unless underlying data are made public. That idea was at the core of a dangerous Environmental Protection Agency rule adopted during the first Trump administration that would have severely hampered the agency’s ability to use the best available science to set pollution standards. A court vacated that rule, but creating an expectation of publicly available datasets for influential science could help future such regulations stand.
- It increases the ability of political officials to interfere with science under the guise of preventing that interference. Before the EO, SI policies were overseen and enforced by scientific integrity officers (SIOs), agency employees whose tenures were not tied to any one presidential administration. Under the new EO, political appointees (or HR representatives) could be in charge of this process. The EO directs these political appointees to evaluate alleged violations of these new standards—which center the administration’s policy agenda, not the validity of the underlying science. This is alarming to scientists, who fear they or their work could be targeted if it doesn’t accord with the administration’s priorities.
- The EO directed federal agencies to revert their SI policies—policies designed by experts to protect science from political interference—back to what they were before President Trump’s first term ended. Without giving a deadline, the order also directed agencies to revise their policies to ensure alignment with the administration’s dubious definition of “gold standard science.”
Despite the lip service paid to scientific principles in the EO, reverting these policies back to what they were in January 2021 has weakened and, in some cases, eliminated documented agency safeguards against politicization. Without a specified deadline for agencies to release new SI policies, it’s unclear how long agencies will adhere to these weakened (or absent) versions. It’s also unclear how much the revised policies will resemble the ones based on guidance developed by federal SI experts. The actions taken by the President and his appointees thus far are not encouraging.
Federal SI policies are a hard-fought win, resulting from a long history of efforts inside and outside government.
As I’ve discussed elsewhere, many agencies created their first SI policies during the Obama administration.
During the Biden administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) convened a group of SI experts charged with making evidence-informed recommendations to strengthen these policies. That group also sought input from the public in developing a framework for agencies to use to create new SI policies. It was thanks to a partnership between the public, these experts, and the federal government that these policies were strengthened and adopted in more agencies during the Biden administration.
Erasing the last four years of this work, informed by dedicated research and public input, is enormously consequential to federal science. We’re at risk of losing necessary safeguards these experts recommended in 2023, including explicitly defining scientific integrity and providing criteria and processes agencies can use to iteratively assess and improve their policies. For some agencies, they’ve been asked to remove the first SI policy that they developed.
By searching and reviewing federal agency websites, I’ve been able to understand the history and evolution of these agency policies. I have a record of the URLs where SI policies have historically lived on agency websites, and I check them periodically for changes and removal of policy. I also use the Internet Archive to confirm general timing of when changes occur, and to compare policies from different administrations.
To illustrate one of the most beneficial changes between policies informed by OSTP’s evidence-informed recommendations in 2023,let’s focus on the creation of the SIO role. When they reverted their policies back to what they were before January 2021, several agencies removed all mention of the SIO positions, and how SIOs assume the responsibility of SI enforcement, resolving SI violations, and helping to professionalize SI within agencies through training and professional development.
For instance, in the current (i.e., pre-2021) versions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology policies, there are vague descriptions of who oversees SI enforcement and oversight. But even across these two agencies, the people appointed to these positions differ from one another. And there is no mention of any such person or position in the current (i.e., pre-2021) National Science Foundation policy.
Something in common across the current policies in these three agencies is that there is no explicit detail of what happens when a potential SI violation is reported and what processes occur to try to resolve them.
According to web data on Internet Archive, when President Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025, all three of these policies explicitly described SIO positions and promised their implementation.
And more jarring yet, several agencies have removed their policies from the URLs where they have historically lived. This includes agencies like the Department of Transportation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. With the absence of these policies, the question becomes what version of scientific integrity protections are being enforced in these agencies—or if there are any protections at all.
This executive order was the first domino that fell in the administration’s official use and application of the deceptive “gold standard science” phrasing. Since the EO was signed, we’ve seen many examples of political officials invoking this phrasing to justify baseless stances, deregulatory actions, and information suppression.
Reverting agency policies back to their pre-2021 versions not only weaken critical scientific integrity safeguards, it also makes protections and policies inconsistent across agencies. A clear benefit of OSTP’s 2023 evidence-informed recommendations was that the policies agencies adopted as a result followed the same formula, and agencies were all held to the same standard in terms of how to prevent and resolve politicization of science.
But all hope isn’t lost. If Congress passed the Scientific Integrity Act, science would be better and more consistently protected. The Scientific Integrity Act would codify safeguards against politicization of science into law, requiring agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee science to adopt and enforce scientific integrity policies that prohibit the suppression of or interference with scientific findings. It would make it much harder to rescind and weaken these protections as the Trump administration has done
The Scientific Integrity Act has bipartisan support and real momentum: it was just introduced in the Senate for the first time in seven years, sponsored by Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. This is a huge win for federal science!
Your help and advocacy have brought this bill to both houses of Congress. If you want to continue to help us defend federal science, please use this link to thank Sen. Schatz and show your support for the SI Act.
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