Latest news with #RestoringGoldStandardScience
The Hill
26-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Views from the front lines of Trump's war on the science community
The Trump administration has unleashed a tsunami of budget cuts to federal science programs. Mass firings have taken place at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, part of a deliberate decimation of research staff across the federal government. Since January, the administration has systematically cut science funding to its lowest level in decades and issued a flood of budget plans and executive orders that are reshaping how the government uses and supports science. Some outcomes have been immediate and tragic, including staffing shortages that have left cancer patients stranded during experimental drug trials and delays in approving COVID-19 vaccines. The extent of these actions is unprecedented. The administration for a time froze all grant funding at the National Science Foundation and abruptly terminated thousands of the ongoing projects that it funds, as well as those of the National Institutes of Health. As scientists at leading research institutions, we have personally witnessed the effects of the administration's policies — including colleagues relocating overseas and students leaving research altogether. Undergraduate science internship programs have been canceled, and graduate programs in many research universities paused. As a result, scientists are increasingly seeking jobs abroad. The administration claims its goals are to increase efficiency and raise the standards of scientific research. In fact, thousands of programs and projects have been cut solely on the basis of ideologically motivated keyword searches, without any concern for their performance, design or conduct. That's not efficient. A Trump executive order issued in May underscores the purely political nature of these attacks. Titled ' Restoring Gold Standard Science,' the order puts hand-picked presidential appointees into every agency to review and 'correct' any evidence or conclusions with which they disagree. That's not scientific. Further, many of the administration's policies effectively punish researchers simply for asking discomfiting questions and punish institutions for teaching about unpopular ideas. Viewed together, these outline a political strategy toward science that is both systematic and dangerous: a full-scale war on the scientific community, the network of individual researchers across many institutions whose collaboration is essential for scientific progress. Despite the media stereotype of a lone genius in a lab coat, science is really a communal activity. As Isaac Newton, one of the most important scientists of all time, wrote: 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.' Every research project builds on foundational theory, tested methods and vetted findings created and refined through previous research. And every scientist depends on the distributed efforts of an extensive community to vet and review manuscripts for publication and proposals for new research, maintain common journals, databases and tools needed to share and build upon knowledge and educate and train the next generation of talent who help operate their labs. Institutions of higher education are the traditional hosts for the scientific community in the U.S, providing an independent forum for developing and refining ideas, an environment for training students and infrastructure for labs and shared resources. For more than 80 years, U.S. society has partnered with these institutions to foster a healthy scientific community. Federal funding enabled universities to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary for scientific research and support the most promising students. The scientific community collaborated to evaluate proposals for research across fields, ensuring resources were directed to the highest-quality projects, independent of political and institutional bias. No system is perfect, but the external scientific community has successfully partnered with the government to provide independent guidance and vetting — balancing competing interests and perspectives to evaluate proposals, advise the agencies that set funding priorities, accredit the programs that train researchers, review research findings and publish research results. Scientists within the government participate in the larger scientific community, reinforcing community standards as they move between jobs, and preserve the autonomy to ask scientific questions and share their findings. The administration's policies represent a three-fold attack on the scientific community. First, the administration aims to directly seize control over the key community functions that support scientific independence: Administrative actions have politicized the review processes for funding at National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, suppressed scientific data and withdrawn support for students. Second, the administration aims to subdue universities that provide an independent home for the community by weaponizing institutional accreditation and student visas, threatening individual institutions and their leadership when they are slow to align with the administration's ideology. Third, the administration is isolating scientists and scientific functions within the government. It does so by sidelining scientific expertise, firing entire independent expert advisory panels, canceling government access to scientific journals, preventing government scientists from publishing in them and, now, subjecting scientific analysis to systematic political modification and censorship. The government's war against science is a disaster for both. Without intellectual and political independence, the scientific community can't function effectively to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems. It's magical thinking for politicians to expect to receive truthful answers about the world when they poll to find the most popular answer, pay to get the answers they want or ignore data they dislike. And it's anti-democratic when political leaders dictate whether questions, data, and conclusions are appropriately scientific. Society needs science to tackle complex problems and to teach others how to do so. Science doesn't function without a healthy scientific community. As citizens, we should debate what problems are essential. As voters, we should decide which problems deserve public research funding. As free people, we should not tolerate political attacks on science and the scientific community. Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT's Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, MIT Libraries. Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Atlantic
20-07-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
Trump's ‘Gold Standard' for Science Manufactures Doubt
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. 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. 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' pioneered by the tobacco 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. 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, 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 who 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 was 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. The results of the 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 —known 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 from 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 a former chemical-industry executive who, in the first Trump administration, helped make regulating PFAS compounds more difficult. After industry objected to rules issued by the Biden administration, Trump's EPA announced that it is delaying enforcement of 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 —creating 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, 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, 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.
Sky News AU
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
Australia's climate left won't be able to stand new Trump appointee Steven E. Koonin who dares to question the science around global warming
The climate science establishment is fond of lecturing us about the dangers of rising temperatures. With the return of Donald Trump as US President, however, it is rising scrutiny, not the rising heat, that has them most alarmed. In May, President Trump signed an executive order titled " Restoring Gold Standard Science ," requiring federally funded agencies to ensure their work is accountable, reproducible, and subject to open debate. It was unremarkable in tone, bordering on mundane. Yet the reaction was swift and bitter. The clause insisting that scientists consider dissenting views and protect employees from retaliation for expressing them cuts across the grain. If applied to almost any other field of government-funded research, it would have passed unnoticed. But in the domain of climate science, where agreeing with the so-called consensus is a condition of entry, it was received as heresy. The New York Times, which has followed these developments with increasing concern, reported this week that the Department of Energy had hired three scientists 'well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change'. The three were named as physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer. Mr Koonin, in particular, has been a persistent irritant to the climate establishment, not least because of his credentials. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the first Obama administration, was chief scientist at BP, and before that, provost at Caltech. In 1985, he co-authored one of the first textbooks on computational physics, making him unusually well qualified to assess the limitations of climate models. His 2021 book, 'Unsettled', drew sharp criticism for stating what many others in the field privately acknowledge: that climate modelling remains too immature to offer confident forecasts. 'We don't understand features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required,' he wrote. Greater processing power, he argued, had only increased the range of uncertainty. Mr Koonin's challenge to the mainstream began in 2014 when he convened a workshop of leading climate scientists and physicists to stress-test the prevailing assumptions. He came away unsettled. The distinction between human influences and natural variation was far from clear. Models often contradicted one another. The technical sections of IPCC reports were routinely oversimplified or misrepresented in press releases and summaries. 'In short,' he wrote, 'the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have upon it.' Mr Koonin's claims are plainly stated and extensively sourced. What is striking is not the volume of rebuttal but the absence of any serious attempt to refute them. He has been the target of denunciation, not debate. That in itself tells us something. Exposing the flaws in an argument is the surest way to demonstrate the strength of one's own. Yet the defenders of consensus seem oddly reluctant to try. Instead, they have surrounded themselves with a rhetorical fortress in which disagreement is cast as denial, and scepticism is treated as a threat. Criticism of Mr Koonin has been particularly fierce in Australia. Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University, accused him of 'feeding climate denial in Australia'. Mr Lowe singled out News Corp (the owner of Sky News Australia) for giving him a platform, along with Fox News in the US. The logic is circular: those who challenge the consensus are said to mislead the public because the consensus is what the public must believe. An invitation to Mr Koonin to speak at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2021 prompted one climate scientist to resign in protest, accusing the lab of undermining science by entertaining views that would confuse the public. The complaint was not about errors in Mr Koonin's work, but the fact of its being heard at all. All this might be less troubling if climate policy were a purely academic concern. But the policies it justifies are costly, coercive, and far-reaching. Hence White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers' statement to the Washington Post last week: 'Future generations should not be expected to forfeit the American Dream to foot the bill of ambiguous climate threats.' The Trump administration's main strategy has been to cut off the stream of funding. The US National Climate Assessment, the flagship government report on global warming, has been quietly shelved. Hundreds of contributors found themselves without contracts, status or support. The Daily Wire reports that the US Global Change Research Program, which oversees the assessment, had a budget of US$4.95 billion in 2025, yet listed just two full-time employees. NASA's climate research has also been trimmed. Michael Mann described the cuts as humiliating. 'It debilitates our standing in the world community,' he said. Zach Labe, formerly of NOAA, put it more bluntly: 'Every day is a train wreck for climate science.' Trump is unlikely to be able to shut down the global warming project entirely. Corporate, philanthropic, academic, and state government funding will ensure that the global warming industrial complex survives. However, by engaging directly with the claims of climate science - rather than fighting a proxy war over energy policy - his administration has changed the terms of the debate. That shift is being felt in Australia too. Scott Morrison's embrace of the 2050 net-zero target brought a welcome cooling in the climate rhetoric. The nuclear debate is important. Yet the risk remains that it distracts from the underlying question: is climate change so dangerous that it warrants radical, expensive, and disruptive intervention? Trump's progress should give Australia's political leaders the courage to stop tiptoeing around the question. Before we discuss the mechanics of decarbonisation, we need an open debate about its justification. Must we not weigh the risks of climate change, such as they are, against the risks to national and economic security posed by over-reaction? Shouldn't we expect the same transparency, contestability, and rigour in climate science that we demand in other areas of public policy? The Trump administration, with the help of Mr Koonin, is determined to decriminalise dissent so that the evidence can be judged on its merits. Its executive order doesn't forbid climate action; it insists that action be justified. If the science is truly settled, it should be able to withstand challenge. That it recoils from scrutiny tells us almost everything we need to know. Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a regular contributor to Sky News Australia
The Hill
18-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
You cannot ‘restore' high scientific standards if they are already in place
President Trump's executive order 'Restoring Gold Standard Science' provides a directive to restore a higher standard for scientific research and discovery. Yet despite the concerns it raises, the very standards that it describes already exist and are widely applied. Section one of the order describes why the administration believes that it is needed. Some of it focuses on the responses to the COVID pandemic. Many now agree that many facets of the response were off-base. The reason for this is much more than the biases noted in this section. Scientific discovery often takes thoughtful reflection, which can be time consuming, fraught with missteps that guide and refocus the research process. The challenge during the COVID pandemic is that real-time policies could not be evaluated as quickly as the public health needs demanded. The net effect was less than ideal solutions and outcomes. With 20-20 hindsight, it is easy now to throw those who were offering guidance 'under the bus.' A parallel to this situation can be found when US Airways flight 1549 lost both its engines upon takeoff from NYC's LaGuardia Airport due to a bird strike. Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger was forced to use his best judgment and experience to safely land the airplane in the Hudson River. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board initially found that the airplane could have landed safely at LaGuardia or Teterboro airports. However, when a 35 second delay was inserted into the decision-making process, paralleling the real-life situation, testing on flight simulators demonstrated that Captain Sullenberger's decision was indeed the right one, saving countless lives. Much of what the executive order espouses is already embedded in the scientific method, a systematic approach to discovering new knowledge. Whether this knowledge is acquired through data collection and analysis, by physical experimentation, or using mathematical analysis based on axiomatic principles, the result is new understandings and insights. Built into the scientific method is the need for reproducibility. This means that if one group of researchers makes a discovery following principles using the scientific method, then another group of researchers who follow the same principles should be able to make the same discovery. The scientific method also allows for incremental discovery, whereby researchers can build upon known results to obtain new insights or stronger conclusions. Yet new knowledge can only provide benefit if it can be widely disseminated, ideally in archival journals. This is where the peer review process comes into play. There are estimated to be more than 30,000 academic journals in existence, not all of which provide equal value. The quality of the editorial board and the integrity of the review processes are critical to assess the novelty, correctness, and value of the research being reported. There are obstacles to such research-archiving. Predatory journals provide rapid dissemination with thin review processes. Their goal is to collect publication fees from unsuspecting researchers who wish to disseminate their findings quickly and with little resistance. Often, researchers early in their careers, or more seasoned researchers whose work is not meeting the peer-review standard of well-respected journals, fall prey to these. The internet also provides an avenue for dissemination. For example, ArXiv allows researchers to post their unpublished manuscripts prior to peer review, allowing them to lay claim to their ideas. It also permits unscrupulous researchers to take others' ideas and publish them as their own in peer-reviewed journals, creating a wild west environment for research dissemination. The executive order also cites a growing number of publication retractions. In 2023, more than 10,000 papers were retracted from research journals. But a deeper dive into these numbers suggests that the problem in the U.S. is not as severe as the executive order suggests. Of the 10,000 papers retracted, 80 percent were from a single publisher. Although the absolute number of papers retracted appears large, the retraction rate is under 0.25 percent, or less than one in 400 papers. Then there is the issue of where the authors of the retracted papers reside. The U.S. is not in the top eight, with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, and China topping the list. Even then, the retraction rate in each of these countries was below one in 330 papers. Scientific research is messy. The scientific method provides guardrails around it. There is nothing wrong with what the executive order espouses. Yet much of what it includes is already imbedded in the scientific method and the research integrity principals that are widely adhered to in academia, industry and government. However, what is 'good for the goose must also be good for the gander.' That means any reports issued by the administration — such as the recent MAHA report by the Department of Health and Human Services — should adhere to the same standards. This places a high standard for any policies put forth by the administration that affect health, economics, technology, and science. It also opens the door for greater scrutiny of such policies and encourages ample feedback from the academic community, who are under currently attack by the administration. What the Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order actually does is give academic, industry, and government researchers the opportunity to take a victory lap, given that much of it outlines the ideal that we all already aspire to. Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of computer science in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public policy.
San Francisco Chronicle
11-06-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
How Trump's ‘gold standard' politicizes federal science
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) H. Christopher Frey, North Carolina State University (THE CONVERSATION) 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. 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. Many large-scale studies that assess how exposure to pollution can harm human health are based on personal data collected according to strict protocols to ensure privacy. Preventing policymakers from considering those findings means they are left to make important decisions about pollution and chemicals without crucial evidence about the health risks. These attempts to create barriers to using valid science echoed tactics used by the tobacco industry from the 1960s well into the 1990s to deny that tobacco use harmed human health. Trump's new executive order also emphasizes 'uncertainty.' In the first Trump administration, the EPA administrator and his hand-picked science advisers, none of whom were epidemiologists, focused on 'uncertainty' in epidemiological studies used to inform decisions on air quality standards. The EPA's scientific integrity policy requires that policymakers 'shall not knowingly misrepresent, exaggerate, or downplay areas of scientific uncertainty associated with policy decisions.' That sounds reasonable. However, in the final 2020 rule for the nation's PM2.5 air quality standard, the EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, stated that 'limitations in the science lead to considerable uncertainty' to justify not lowering the standard, the level considered unhealthy. PM2.5 comes largely from fossil fuel combustion in cars, power plants and factories. In contrast, an independent external group of scientific experts, which I was part of as an environmental engineer and former EPA adviser, reviewed the same evidence and came to a very different conclusion. We found clear scientific evidence supporting a more stringent standard for PM2.5. The executive order also requires that science be conducted in a manner that is ' skeptical of its findings and assumptions.' A true skeptic can be swayed to change an inference based on evidence, whereas a denialist holds a fixed view irrespective of evidence. Denialists tend to cherry-pick evidence, set impossible levels of evidence and engage in logical fallacies. The first Trump administration stacked the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which advises EPA on setting health-protective air quality standards, with opponents of environmental regulation, including people connected to industries the EPA regulates. The committee then amplified uncertainties. It also shifted the burden of proof in ways inconsistent with the statutory requirement to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety. The current administration has been dismantling science advisory committees in various agencies again and purging key EPA committees of independent experts. Who decides when politics trumps science According to Trump, ' violations ' of his executive order will be determined by a 'senior appointee designated by the agency head.' This means a political appointee accountable to the White House. Thus, science in each federal agency will be politicized. The political appointee is required to 'correct scientific information.' Anyone can file a 'request for correction ' regarding a published agency report. During the first Trump administration, chemical companies or their representatives repeatedly filed requests for changes to final EPA toxicity assessments on ethylene oxide and chloroprene. The administration delayed health-protective actions, which were finally addressed during the Biden administration for both chemicals. The request for correction process is intended to correct errors, not to bias assessments to be more favorable to industry and to delay protective actions. The bottom line on Trump's 'gold standard' While the language of the executive order may seem innocuous based on a casual reading, it risks undermining unbiased science in all federal agencies, subject to political whims. Setting impossible bars for 'transparency' can mean regulators ignore relevant and valid scientific studies. Overemphasizing uncertainties can be used to raise doubt and unduly undermine confidence in robust findings. A politicized process also 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. Thus, this executive order could be used to deprive the American public of accurate and unbiased information regarding chemicals in the environment. That would prevent the development of effective evidence-based policies necessary for the protection of human health, rather than advancing the best available science.
