‘Gold Standard Science’ may lead to discarding valid research

President Donald J. Trump’s executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science” is drawing strong criticism from scientists who say the order gives the administration a way to discount scientific evidence it doesn’t like or agree with.

The order, issued May 23, outlines new rules that put political appointees in charge of upholding high scientific-research standards that all federal agencies need to put into practice. Critics say that these scientific standards are theoretically ideal but impossible to actually meet.

“The key concern is that [the executive order] inserts a political process into how scientific evidence is understood and used,” says Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, an advocacy group. If the evidence from an agency does not meet this standard, the appointee can charge federal scientists with misconduct, or the evidence may not be used to inform public policy, he says. “That’s a recipe for deciding, on the basis of political interests, to ignore any and all scientific evidence because it doesn’t meet this aspirational standard.”

In the order, Trump says that two goals are to rebuild public trust in science and ensure that science is no longer manipulated or misused to justify political ends. “Gold Standard Science” is defined as reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer review, clear about errors and uncertainties, skeptical of assumptions, collaborative, interdisciplinary, accepting of negative results, and free from conflicts of interest. Trump also directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to give federal agencies guidance on how to adopt the “Gold Standard Science” principles within 30 days.

“There is a crisis of trust between the scientific community and the American public. President Trump’s gold standard science Executive Order creates a path for rebuilding this relationship through common sense scientific principles,” says OSTP spokesperson Victoria LaCivita.

When asked how Trump’s directive to use a political appointee to uphold scientific standards will ensure that science won’t be used to justify political ends, LaCivita responded with discussion about the administration of Joe Biden. She declined to answer further.

‘A Fool’s Gold Standard’

Each federal agency head will appoint their agency’s new overseer of science, who will evaluate violations of the scientific standards in the executive order “and other applicable agency policies governing the generation, use, interpretation, and communication of scientific information,” the order says.

“So all of the decisions go through this one politically appointed person, and there’s a lot of subjective requirements in here that can be used inappropriately,” says Andy Miller, former senior science advisor for the Office of Research and Development at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “If [the consequences] weren’t so serious, the text here would be laughable, because they’re arguing against the exact things that they’re doing right now,” he says.

Stand Up for Science, a community group that opposes political interference in science, penned an open letter about the order, calling it “a Fool’s Gold Standard” and a “bad faith appropriation of scientific language and principles.” At the time this story was published, nearly 4,500 people had signed the letter.

The scientific research standards the executive order (EO) lists out might look like a good idea, Nosek says, because on its face it seems like the administration is trying to promote scientific rigor and transparency. But looking closely, that’s not what the order does, he says. “It uses those terms, but in the end, it creates a situation where the EO can convert those principles of good practice into weapons against scientific evidence,” Nosek says.

That’s because this scientific gold standard is an aspirational ideal, not a realistic one, Nosek says. Every study has limitations in some area, such as the resources available, or the methodology needed for a specific question. “The way that the scientific process works is to use the best available methods with the most rigorous approach possible,” he says. “So when we set an ideal, like that list, we set it as a target that we are constantly striving for and not necessarily ever reaching in any given individual study,” he says. But the collective body of work on a subject, consisting of many studies with varying methods and limitations, would likely meet these standards, he says.

According to the executive order, if an individual study doesn’t meet all of the listed criteria, the new political appointee could discount it as evidence with which to make policy. “And instead, we’ll go on the basis of, well, what? What is the alternative?” Nosek says. “That’s a relatively scary proposition, because scientific evidence is the best type of evidence that we have for informing how we should improve the human condition.”

This is a similar tactic to what the Trump administration has previously attempted, says Gretchen Goldman, president of the advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists. During the first Trump administration, Scott Pruitt, then head of the EPA, attempted to issue rules that required the EPA to cite only scientific studies in which the underlying data were publicly available.

One notable example involved the Clean Air Act, Goldman says, which requires the ambient air quality standards to be based on what level of pollution is harmful to public health. “They claimed that we cannot use science, specifically epidemiologic science that demonstrates harm from pollution, if we don’t have all the underlying raw data from every study used for the past 40 years,” Goldman says. There are many reasons that scientists wouldn’t have access to raw data, such as when it contains personally identifying health information, she says.

The big picture is that this executive order is setting up the permission structure to throw out valid scientific information, Goldman says. Executive orders aren’t laws, and they aren’t meant to be enforceable, she says. So even though “Restoring Gold Standard Science” is just an executive order, “it’s the high-level setup for future things that they could do,” she says. “So we should watch the space.”