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SUNDAY SCIENCE: TRUMP’S ‘GOLD STANDARD’ FOR SCIENCE
MANUFACTURES DOUBT  
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David Michaels, Wendy Wagner
July 20, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ By emphasizing scientific uncertainty above other values, political
appointees can block any regulatory action they want to. _

, Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: ElementalImaging / Getty.

 

Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy released a document
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its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out
in President Donald Trump’s executive order for “Restoring Gold
Standard Science
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seem anodyne enough: They include calls for federal and federally
supported science to be reproducible and transparent, communicative of
error and uncertainty, and subject to unbiased peer review. Some of
the tenets might be difficult to apply in practice—one can’t
simply reproduce the results of studies on the health effects of
climate disasters, for example, and funding is rarely available to
replicate expensive studies. But these unremarkable principles hide a
dramatic shift in the relationship between science and government.

Trump’s executive order promises to ensure that “federal decisions
are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific
evidence available.” In practice, however, it gives political
appointees—most of whom are not scientists—the authority to define
scientific integrity and then decide which evidence counts and how it
should be interpreted. The president has said that these measures are
necessary to restore trust in the nation’s scientific
enterprise—which has indeed eroded since the last time he was in
office
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But these changes will likely only undermine trust further. Political
officials no longer need to rigorously disprove existing findings;
they can cast doubt on inconvenient evidence, or demand unattainable
levels of certainty, to make those conclusions appear unsettled or
unreliable.

In this way, the executive order opens the door to reshaping science
to fit policy goals rather than allowing policy to be guided by the
best available evidence. Its tactics echo the “doubt science”
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industry, which enabled cigarette manufacturers to market a deadly
product for decades. But the tobacco industry could only have dreamed
of having the immense power of the federal government. Applied to
government, these tactics are ushering this country into a new era of
doubt in science and enabling political appointees to block any
regulatory action they want to, whether it’s approving a new drug or
limiting harmful pollutants.

Historically, political appointees generally—though not
always—deferred to career government scientists when assessing and
reporting on the scientific evidence underlying policy decisions. But
during Trump’s first term, these norms began to break down, and
political officials asserted far greater control over all facets of
science-intensive policy making, particularly in contentious areas
such as climate science
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In response, the Biden administration invested considerable effort in
restoring scientific integrity and independence, building new
procedures and frameworks to bolster the role of career scientists in
federal decision making.

Trump’s new executive order not only rescinds these Joe Biden–era
reforms but also reconceptualizes the meaning of scientific integrity.
Under the Biden-era framework
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for example, the definition of _scientific integrity_ focused on
“professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of
honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results
of, and communicating about science and scientific activities.” The
framework also emphasized transparency, and political appointees and
career staff were both required to uphold these scientific standards.
Now the Trump administration has scrapped that process, and appointees
enjoy full control over what _scientific integrity_ means and how
agencies review and synthesize scientific literature necessary to
support and shape policy decisions.

Although not perfect, the Biden framework also included a way for
scientists to appeal decisions by their supervisors. By contrast,
Trump’s executive order creates a mechanism by which career
scientists who publicly dissent from the pronouncements of political
appointees can be charged with “scientific misconduct” and be
subject to disciplinary action. The order says such misconduct does
not include differences of opinion, but gives political appointees the
power to determine what counts, while providing employees no route for
appeal. This dovetails with other proposals by the administration
to make it easier to fire career employees
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express inconvenient scientific judgments.

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Kush Desai argued
that “public perception of scientific integrity completely eroded
during the COVID era, when Democrats and the Biden administration
consistently invoked an unimpeachable ‘the science’ to justify and
shut down any reasonable questioning of unscientific lockdowns, school
shutdowns, and various intrusive mandates” and that the
administration is now “rectifying the American people’s complete
lack of trust of this politicized scientific establishment.”

But the reality is that, armed with this new executive order,
officials can now fill the administrative record with caveats,
uncertainties, and methodological limitations—regardless of their
relevance or significance, and often regardless of whether they could
ever realistically be resolved. This strategy is especially powerful
against standards enacted under a statute that takes a precautionary
approach in the face of limited scientific evidence.

Some of our most important protections have been implemented while
acknowledging scientific uncertainty. In 1978, although industry
groups objected that uncertainty
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still too high to justify regulations, several agencies banned the use
of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol spray cans,
based on modeling that predicted CFCs were destroying the ozone layer
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modeling were eventually confirmed, and the scientists who did the
work were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Elevating scientific uncertainty above other values gives political
appointees a new tool to roll back public-health and environmental
standards and to justify regulatory inaction. The result is a
scientific record created less to inform sound decision making than to
delay it—giving priority to what we don’t know over what we do.
Certainly, probing weaknesses in scientific findings is central to the
scientific enterprise, and good science should look squarely at ways
in which accepted truths might be wrong. But manufacturing and
magnifying doubt undercuts science’s ability to describe reality
with precision and fealty, and undermines legislation that directs
agencies to err on the side of protecting health and the environment.
In this way, the Trump administration can effectively violate
statutory requirements by stealth, undermining Congress’s mandate
for precaution by manipulating the scientific record to appear more
uncertain than scientists believe it is.

An example helps bring these dynamics into sharper focus. In recent
years, numerous studies have linked PFAS compounds
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as “forever chemicals” because they break down extremely slowly,
if at all, in the environment and in human bodies—to a range of
health problems, including immunologic and reproductive effects;
developmental effects or delays in children, including low birth
weight, accelerated puberty, and behavioral changes; and increased
risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers.

Yet despite promises
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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to better protect the public from PFAS
compounds, efforts to weaken current protections are already under
way. The president has installed in a key position at the EPA
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former chemical-industry executive who, in the first Trump
administration, helped make regulating PFAS compounds more difficult
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After industry objected to rules
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by the Biden administration, Trump’s EPA announced that it is
delaying enforcement
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drinking-water standards for two of the PFAS forever chemicals until
2031 and rescinding the standards for four others. But Zeldin faces a
major hurdle in accomplishing this feat: The existing PFAS standards
are backed by the best currently available scientific evidence linking
these specific chemicals to a range of adverse health effects.

Here, the executive order provides exactly the tools needed to rewrite
the scientific basis for such a decision. First, political officials
can redefine what counts as valid science by establishing their own
version of the “gold standard.” Appointees can instruct government
scientists to comb through the revised body of evidence and highlight
every disagreement or limitation—regardless of its relevance or
scientific weight. They can cherry-pick the data, giving greater
weight to studies that support a favored result. Emphasizing
uncertainty biases the government toward inaction: The evidence no
longer justifies regulating these exposures.

This “doubt science” strategy is further enabled by industry’s
long-standing refusal to test many of its own PFAS compounds—of
which there are more than 12,000, only a fraction of which have been
tested
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large evidence gaps. The administration can claim that regulation is
premature until more “gold standard” research is conducted. But
who will conduct that research? Industry has little incentive to
investigate the risks of its own products, and the Trump
administration has shown no interest in requiring it to do so.
Furthermore, the government controls the flow of federal research
funding and can restrict public science at its source. In fact, the
EPA under Trump has already canceled millions of dollars in PFAS
research
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asserting that the work is “no longer consistent with EPA funding
priorities.”

In a broader context, the “gold standard” executive order is just
one part of the administration’s larger effort to weaken the
nation’s scientific infrastructure. Rather than restore “the
scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply
scientific knowledge in service of the public good,” as the
executive order promises, Elon Musk and his DOGE crew fired hundreds,
if not thousands, of career scientists and abruptly terminated
billions of dollars of ongoing research. To ensure that federal
research support remains low, Trump’s recently proposed
budget slashes the research budgets of virtually every government
research agency
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including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of
Health, and the EPA.

Following the hollowing-out of the nation’s scientific
infrastructure through deep funding cuts and the firing of federal
scientists, the executive order is an attempt to rewrite the rules of
how our expert bureaucracy operates. It marks a fundamental shift: The
already weakened expert agencies will no longer be tasked with
producing scientific findings that are reliable by professional
standards and insulated from political pressure. Instead, political
officials get to intervene at any point to elevate studies that
support their agenda and, when necessary, are able to direct agency
staff—under threat of insubordination—to scour the record for
every conceivable uncertainty or point of disagreement. The result is
a system in which science, rather than informing policy, is shaped to
serve it.

_DAVID MICHAELS is a professor at the George Washington University
Milken Institute School of Public Health. He served as an assistant
secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration from 2009 to 2017. He is the author of The Triumph of
Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (Oxford University
Press, 2020)._

_WENDY WAGNER is the Richard Dale Endowed Chair at the University of
Texas School of Law._

_When the founders of THE ATLANTIC gathered in Boston in the spring
of 1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable
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_Here is the mission statement published in the very first issue
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_FIRST: In Literature, to leave no province unrepresented, so that
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How Women Shaped Human Evolution Through Food Processing
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Karen L. Kramer
Sapiens.org
July 23, 2025

* Science
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* scientific integrity
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* Donald Trump
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* Politics
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* authoritarian regimes
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* regulations
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