TARGETING SCIENCEHow Trump’s ‘Gold Standard’ Politicizes Federal Science
The language of Trump’s so-called “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order of 23 May 2025 may seem innocuous based on a casual reading, but it risks undermining unbiased science in all federal agencies, subject to political whims. A politicized process has the potential to punish federal employees and to ignore external peer reviewers who have the temerity to advance evidence-based findings contrary to White House ideology.
The first time Donald Trump was president, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed a regulation known as the “science transparency” rule. The administration liked to call it the “secret science” rule.
“Transparency” sounds positive, but this rule instead prevented the EPA from using some of the best available science to protect human health.
For example, it required the EPA to ignore or downplay studies that established links between exposure to chemicals and health damage if those studies were based on confidential patient information that could not be released to the public. The problem: Many health studies, including those underpinning many U.S. pollution rules, rely on confidential patient information.
A U.S. District Court struck down the rule on procedural grounds a few weeks after it was issued. But now, the idea is back.
Trump’s so-called Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order of May 23, 2025, resurrects many features of the EPA’s vacated rule, but it applies them to all federal agencies.
To many readers, the executive order might sound reasonable. It mentions “transparency,” “reproducibility” and “uncertainty.” However, the devil is in the details.
What’s Wrong with Transparency and Reproducibility?
“Transparency” implies that scientists should adequately explain all elements of their work, including hypotheses, methods, results and conclusions in a way that helps others see how those conclusions were reached.
“Data transparency” is an expectation that scientists should share all data used in the study so other scientists can recalculate the results. This is also known as “reproducibility.”
Trump’s executive order focuses on reproducibility. However, if there are errors in the data or methods of the original study, being able to reproduce its results may only ensure consistency but not scientific rigor.
More important to scientific rigor is “replicability.” Replicability means different scientists, working with different data and different methods, can arrive at consistent findings. For example, studies of human exposure to a set of pollutants at different locations, and with different populations, that consistently find relationships to health effects, such as illness and premature death, can increase confidence in the findings.
Replicability doesn’t require releasing confidential health data, as reproducibility would. Instead, it looks for the same results broadly from other sources.
The science transparency rule in the first Trump administration was intended to limit the EPA’s ability to consider epidemiologic studies like those that established the health harms from exposure to secondhand smoke and to PM2.5, fine particles often from pollution.
