The National Association of Scholars (NAS) enthusiastically endorses the Executive Order (EO) Restoring Gold Standard Science, signed by President Trump on May 23. The EO declares the federal government’s intention of requiring that all federal agencies use science that is reproducible, transparent, and generally characterized by procedures that inhibit science that partakes of the irreproducibility crisis of modern science. This EO places the weight of the federal government on the side of ensuring that the scientific research it uses provides true knowledge about the natural world. It will do a great deal as well to cure the irreproducibility crisis in the scientific world as a whole, and not just those fields whose results directly affect federal policy.
We are enthusiastic about this EO partly because NAS has been calling for precisely such policy changes since 2018, when we published The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science. Since then we have published public comments on Environmental Protection Agency reproducibility policy; co-sponsored the conference Fixing Science: Practical Solutions for the Irreproducibility Crisis; published the four Shifting Sands reports on how the irreproducibility crisis has affected government policy via research in the disciplines of environmental epidemiology, nutritional epidemiology, public health, and implicit bias theory; and published a Model Science Policy Code, which includes our model federal statutes for how to address the irreproducibility crisis. Restoring Gold Standard Science declares its intent to reorient federal policy precisely along the lines we have championed.
Of course the Trump administration is not doing so simply because of our work. Science reformers have been championing reproducibility and transparency reforms for a generation. The Information Quality Act, also known as the Data Quality Act, broadly declared the federal government’s commitment to better-quality science as far back as 2000. Researchers such as the late Patrick J. Michaels were publishing research in the 2000s on the effects of the reproducibility crisis on fields such as climate science. Louis Anthony Cox, Jr., while serving on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) for the EPA in the 2010s, made extensive and insightful critiques of the EPA’s use of scientific information. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) long has championed reproducibility and transparency reforms, most recently in Modernizing the EPA: A Blueprint for Congress (2025). A generation of science reformers may take credit for inspiring this EO. We are proud to say that in the last decade we have been loud among those voices.
We have championed reproducibility and transparency reforms partly because they are vital for the proper functioning of scientific research. The irreproducibility crisis is the product of improper research techniques, a lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results. Other factors include inadequate or compromised peer review, secrecy, conflicts of interest, ideological commitments, and outright dishonesty. Many supposedly scientific results cannot be reproduced reliably in subsequent investigations and offer no trustworthy insight into the way the world works. A majority of modern research findings in many disciplines may well be wrong.
Or, as Restoring Gold Standard Science accurately states,
Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly. A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis. The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research.
The irreproducibility crisis is not just a general crisis in science. It is particularly a crisis in federal science policy. Technocrats and radical activists embedded in government service have weaponized the powers delegated to federal science regulatory agencies, as well as the authority accorded to putatively nonpartisan scientific experts, to advance their policy goals without transparency or accountability to elected policymakers or the public. Activist bureaucrats actively commission the false positive research results produced by the irreproducibility crisis in a host of scientific and social scientific disciplines to justify the mass production of illiberal, radical regulations throughout the federal science regulatory agencies. The federal government, moreover, is the largest single funder of scientific research in the world, and federal funds not only distort American regulatory policy but also subsidize the wholesale production of irreproducible research in American universities. Federal science policy supercharged the irreproducibility crisis and only federal science policy reform can bring it to an end.
We also have championed reproducibility and transparency reforms because NAS’s core mission is to promote the search for truth, and these reforms are necessary for the sciences to search for truth once more. We oppose “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in the humanities and social sciences not least because that ideology, and its kin, explicitly subordinate the search for truth to the search for power. We oppose the practices that create the irreproducibility crisis in the sciences, and in federal science policy, because it does precisely the same thing in the sciences—subordinates the search for truth to the search for power. Scholars, all lovers of truth, should combat both DEI and the irreproducibility crisis with equal conviction and equal power.
We are delighted with the Trump administration’s Restoring Gold Standard Science—not least because it commits the federal government to NAS’s ideals as regards the irreproducibility crisis in the same way that previous EOs such as Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity committed it to opposing DEI. The federal government now is pledged to remarkably sophisticated concepts of scientific truth seeking; e.g., the stipulation that gold-standard science is “structured for falsifiability of hypotheses” commits federal policy to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. American government policy has become scholarly in the best sense—and we would be especially delighted if we were responsible for this transformation.
Yet although we are delighted with what the Trump administration has done with the EO, we urge them to do more. Restoring Gold Standard Science still leaves important work to be done. This work includes:
- Enforcement. Restoring Gold Standard Science declares the federal government’s intent to ensure that government science is reproducible and transparent. This intent must be turned into detail regulation in a host of agencies. We urge the Trump administration to follow up on this EO with comprehensive work that ensures that every federal agency has integrated this EO’s principles into their regulations by January 2029.
- Grants. It isn’t clear if Restoring Gold Standard Science requires recipients of federal science grants to follow these new reproducibility and transparency guidelines. We urge the Trump administration to clarify whether the EO applies to federal grants. If it does not, we urge that it issue a companion EO, along the lines of our model Reproducible Grants Act.
- National Security. Restoring Gold Standard Science prudently exempts military and national security affairs. We generally agree with this exemption: Americans should see how these reforms function in civilian research before they apply them to research that affects our national security. Nevertheless, we also should in due time extend these principles throughout the government—not least because the current exemption will tempt activist bureaucrats to hide (say) politicized climate-change research in the Department of Defense.
- Statutes. Transparency and reproducibility should be hard-wired into federal government policy by statute. We urge the Trump administration to make a priority of science reform legislation—perhaps inspired by our Model Science Policy Code.
We have made a great many more detailed policy recommendations in our reports and model legislation, and we generally urge the Trump administration to consider whether they might be useful. But we think the Trump administration should focus in its future work on these four priorities.
But we urge the Trump administration to do more to bring full effect to the wonderful start it has made with Restoring Gold Standard Science. The irreproducibility crisis has been for generations the crying scandal of American science. This EO begins at last the necessary task of making American science great again.
The Trump administration’s EO is a philosopher’s stone: it will turn base matter into gold.
Photo by Julia Koblitz on Unsplash
