With New Guidance, Trump Administration Deceptively Targets Scientific Integrity
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1. There is no mention of the importance of science being used to inform federal policy. Historically, scientific research and analysis have been consulted, conducted, and considered in the development and implementation of federal policy and regulations. As Jennifer Jones—the Program Director of UCS’s Center for Science and Democracy—explained here, if you take prescription medication, if you have access to clean drinking water, if you have confidence in the safety of your food, you’ve benefited from the science used to inform federal regulations.
Notably, scientific consensus and expertise also underpin a lot of government funded services—like weather predictions and forecasts—and data—such as Census datasets on housing and education trends or interactive maps detailing geographic areas with high pollution. In fact, entire departments and offices within federal agencies, like the Office of Research and Development in the Environmental Protection Agency, have been created by law or mandated by Congress to ensure science is consulted in federal decision making processes.
Previous guidance released by the federal government often emphasized this historical relationship. For example, a group of SI experts across the federal government released comprehensive guidance for federal agencies to follow in 2023 to protect federal scientists and their work from political interference. At multiple points in this guidance, the experts emphasize that the best available science should be consulted in federal decision making.
The guidance released by OSTP in June does not mention this relationship or its importance at all. This notable exclusion leaves many more questions about the role science will play in developing and enforcing policy within federal agencies during the second Trump administration.
2. “Independent” (as in “independent science”) is not written anywhere in the guidance (or the EO). The overarching goal of scientific integrity policies was to prevent scientific processes, research, or results from being altered, buried, or otherwise interfered with. UCS has been tracking ways that the federal government—regardless of the president or political party in charge—has practiced such interference over two decades, resulting in real harm to communities and to our planet.
When I say it’s important to keep science independent, I mean that it’s important to let federal scientists design, conduct, and communicate the results of their work without fear of censorship or retaliation, even if what they find is inconvenient for political, ideological, or corporate actors. As one example, this means letting research that shows a connection between chemicals like ethylene oxide and cancer see the light of day, even if it means that science will form the basis of rules that may impact industrial facilities that emit those chemicals.
Despite the importance of independent science, and the fact that previous guidance on federal science prioritized it, the June OSTP guidance does not discuss it. This troubling omission becomes more alarming as we consider the next red flag.
3. The guidance doesn’t specify who will hold political interference to account. Biden-era SI guidance tasked career staffers with overseeing SI policy enforcement and resolving potential SI violations. These Scientific Integrity Officials work within the agencies whose integrity they oversee and are not beholden to any individual administration. These roles and responsibilities were explicitly recommended by SI experts during President Biden’s administration. This meant that federal agencies who did not already have their own version of Scientific Integrity Officers were directed to institute one.
In President Trump’s EO, he directed federal agencies to revert SI policies back to what they were before the conclusion of his first term, leaving many of these roles vulnerable to termination. Moreover, President Trump’s EO explicitly directs that political or HR officials be appointed to this type of role, giving them the power to oversee the enforcement of these new policies, as well as resolving any violations. At best, this directive may put people who do not have agency-relevant expertise in this role. At worst, it would open the door to the kind of politicization President Trump claims he wants to end.
Because the OSTP guidance does not specify who will be placed in these oversight roles, it’s unclear who will be taking up the mantle to protect science from politicization from within federal agencies. If political officials with loyalty to the Trump administration do replace non-partisan career officials, the chances of political interference in federal science only becomes greater.
4. There are no directives to help protect federal scientists, whether from censorship or from retaliation. As I mentioned earlier, SI policies were created to help protect science from interference, because science isn’t always convenient for political, corporate, and ideological agendas. To this point, Biden-era SI policies made more explicit the protections federal workers have against politicization of their work.
One way SI policies did this was byfacilitating open communication between federal agencies and the public. In the past, federal workers have been barred from sharing their work and their expertise with members of the media or with the public, whether that’s through interviews, social media posts, publications, or other platforms. As we saw in January, censoring federal scientists impacts critical and timely agency communication with the public, like updates on the avian flu.
Protection from retaliation was an area that was developed more during President Biden’s administration with the release of OSTP’s SI Framework in 2023. In this guidance, SI experts emphasized that workers who speak out and report on SI violations, like after a political official tells scientists to alter reports to support an administration’s preferred conclusion, should have explicit legal and professional protections. Reverting SI policies back to what they were in January 2021 will endanger these types of protections. And with no mention of their importance in the new OSTP guidance, it’s unclear how that will be handled by individual agencies.