‘Gold Standard Science’ Plans Emphasize Existing Agency Efforts

Agency plans for implementing the “gold standard science” executive order by President Donald Trump largely commit to continuing or expanding long-standing policies relating to scientific integrity and public access, contrasting with the strong reform language presented in the original order.

The plans began to roll out last month, after a 60-day drafting deadline triggered by the release of guidance by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy are among the agencies that have publicly released their plans.

The guidance directed agencies to describe how they are working to ensure the science they support is reproducible, transparent, unbiased, and free of conflicts of interest, among other goals.

“For the entirety of these federal agencies’ existence, they’ve really been working to increase all of these things, and I think that’s really well reflected in the reports that came out of NIH, DOE and NSF,” said Maryam Zaringhalam, senior director of policy at the Center for Open Science and a former OSTP official during the Biden administration.

Cultural change

Agencies were also required to identify challenges to implementing the executive order’s goals.

NSF’s plan states that “cultural change” will be needed in the scientific community to achieve “broad adherence” with some of the order’s tenets, such as accepting null results as a positive outcome for research projects. NSF says it will work to develop “establish community-driven and community-accepted norms” for sharing of null or negative results.

Ian Banks, director for science policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, applauded the mention of cultural change in NSF’s plan, saying “in order to address the reproducibility crisis and to improve scientific integrity, we have to address the cultural problems.”

“Scientific cultures as we have them today are truly conservative in the sense they resist change, but we clearly need change, and the gold standard science is a path towards that change,” Banks added.

However, Zaringhalam believes the agencies’ implementation reports push back against the notion that sweeping changes are needed.

“The idea of restoring something that has somehow fallen away or crumbled in previous administrations, I think, is … problematic,” Zaringhalam said.

She also argued that the Trump administration has failed to live up to its own definition of gold standard science, stating, for instance, that DOE did not use a regular peer review process for the recent report it commissioned that concluded the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are less damaging than is widely accepted.

Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the nature of the implementation plans also leaves room for undue political influence in science.

“The biggest reason that scientific integrity policies were created in the first place was to prevent inappropriate influence in scientific processes … mainly like political influence,” Barbati-Dajches said. “And there was no emphasis of that in the OSTP guidance.”

Concerns over political influence have been stoked by the Trump administration placing enforcement of the gold standard science principles in the hands of political appointees.

OSTP Director Michael Kratsios has defended the oversight model as consistent with democratic government. “It is the responsibility of those appointed to represent the people to help direct and coordinate the taxpayer-supported research enterprise in the national interest,” he wrote in a June op-ed.

Academic freedom

Although the agency implementation plans generally build on existing initiatives, one notable shift from the status quo is that NIH’s plan states the agency is placing a new focus on “academic freedom.”

NIH’s attention to the subject has been driven by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who announced in April that the agency would be reviewing its Intramural Research Program to make sure NIH scientists can engage in “open, academic discourse without fear of official interference, professional disadvantage, or workplace retaliation.”

NIH’s plan states the agency is modifying its policies governing researcher interactions with the media and is “exploring plans to shift its process for scholarly works from approving scientific content or findings to reviewing exclusively for policy and regulatory compliance.”

While many NIH scientists have applauded the focus on academic freedom, 484 staff signed a letter to Bhattacharya in June arguing the Trump administration has selectively applied the principle. The letter points to recently interrupted grants on subjects such as health disparities and COVID as examples of censorship.

Other agency plans do not use the academic freedom terminology but do address ways of fostering dissenting opinions. For instance, NSF plans to “expand the specific clauses on ‘differences of scientific opinion’ in the upcoming updated Scientific Integrity Policy.”