Trump’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Science Manufactures Doubt
David Michaels, Wendy Wagner | 20 July 2025 | The Atlantic
Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document detailing its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out in President Donald Trump’s executive order for “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” 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….