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TRUMP’S NEW ‘GOLD STANDARD’ RULE WILL DESTROY AMERICAN SCIENCE
AS WE KNOW IT  
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Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider,
Michael Mann, Brian Nosek
May 29, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The new executive order allows political appointees to undermine
research they oppose, paving the way for state-controlled science _

‘We see this executive order for what it is: an attempt to sell the
US’s future for pyrite.’, Michael Nigro/Pacific
Press/Rex/Shutterstock

 

Science is under siege
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On Friday evening, the White House released an executive order
called Restoring Gold Standard Science
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At face value, this order promises a commitment to federally funded
research that is “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” and policy
that is informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial
scientific evidence available”. But hidden beneath the scientific
rhetoric is a plan that would destroy scientific independence in the
US by giving political appointees the latitude to dismiss entire
bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line
with the current administration’s objectives. In other words: this
is Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.

According to the order, “Gold Standard Science means science
conducted in a manner that is:

(i) reproducible;

(ii) transparent;

(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;

(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;

(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;

(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;

(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;

(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and

(ix) without conflicts of interest.”

The order mimics the language of an active reform movement in science
to increase rigor and transparency of research – a movement commonly
called the open science movement, to which some of us are
contributors. Science is, by nature, a continuous work in progress,
constantly self-scrutinized and always looking for opportunities to
improve. We should all be able to celebrate any administration’s
investment in improving the openness, integrity and reproducibility of
research.

But, with this executive order, we cannot.

Instead of being about open science, it grants administration-aligned
political appointees the power to designate any research as scientific
misconduct based on their own “judgment” and includes the power to
punish the scientists involved accordingly; this would weaponize
government
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to the public interest.

The consequences of state-dictated science can be catastrophic. When
Trofim Lysenko, a researcher who denied the reality of genetic
inheritance and natural selection, won favor with Joseph Stalin and
took control of agriculture in the Soviet Union, thousands of
scientists who disagreed with him were fired, imprisoned or killed.
His disastrous agricultural prescriptions ultimately led to famines
that killed millions in the USSR and in China.

Science does not proceed by sequentially establishing unassailable
conclusions, but rather by steadily accumulating numerous lines of
evidence, scrutinizing weaknesses, and pursuing additional evidence.
Almost any study, any source of evidence, any conclusion, falls short
of meeting every aspect of the White House’s list of best practices.
This has nothing to do with laziness, let alone misconduct by
individual scientists; it’s simply a consequence of the fact that
science is difficult. Scientists constantly grapple with uncertainty,
and nevertheless can ultimately arrive at robust, valid conclusions,
such as the fact that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the
burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and wreaking havoc on
our climate
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Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to
the president can willfully find justification to
label _any_ research finding as scientific misconduct, and then
penalize the researchers involved accordingly._ _This administration
has _already_ appropriated the language of open science to assert
control over and deal heavy blows 
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the scientific ecosystem of the United States –
including cancelling thousands of active research grants
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science
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and disinformation
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health
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health
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health
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education
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Calls to “revisit” decades of work that establish vaccine safety
beyond a shadow of a doubt “because the only way you can get good
science is through replication”
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and demands for unethical vaccine clinical trial practices
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additional data, further echo the bad-faith adoption of open science
language.

Trump has also advanced a congressional budget calling for massive
cuts to federal spending on research and development
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levied significant retaliation 
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universities that have not fallen in line with his demands. He has
gone so far as to propose a rule change by the office of personnel
management [[link removed]] that would
install policy police at all levels of federal agencies, converting
thousands of employees into presidential appointees who can be
summarily fired without due process for any arbitrary political
reason. This new executive order raises the concern that many of
our best scientists
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targeted in Lysenkoist purges. Meanwhile, the threat of such actions
is already having a chilling effect on all scientists.

Science is the most important long-term investment for humanity.
Interference in the scientific process by political arbiters stifles
scientists’ freedom of speech and thought. Science depends on
unfettered speech – free and continuous discussion of data and
ideas. We, like the rest of the scientific community, aspire to
achieve greater openness, integrity and reproducibility of research to
accelerate discovery, advance treatments and foster solutions to meet
society’s greatest challenges. Meeting that objective will not occur
by centralizing power over science and scientists according to the
whims of any political administration. We see this executive order for
what it is: an attempt to sell the US’s future for pyrite.

_COLETTE DELAWALLA
[[link removed]] is
a PhD candidate at Emory University and executive director of Stand Up
for Science. _

_VICTOR AMBROS [[link removed]] is a
2024 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine at the Chan Medical
School, University of Massachusetts. _

_CARL BERGSTROM [[link removed]] is
professor of biology at the University of Washington. _

_CAROL GREIDER [[link removed]] is a
2009 Nobel laureate in medicine and distinguished professor at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. _

_MICHAEL MANN [[link removed]] is the
presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental
science and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and
the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. _

_BRIAN NOSEK [[link removed]] is executive
director of the Center for Open Science and professor of psychology at
the University of Virginia_

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