May 2025

On May 23, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that calls for federal agencies to commit to “gold standard science” in response to claims of a reproducibility crisis and misleading use of evidence. Federal agencies are also urged to revert to the scientific integrity policies held during the first Trump administration.

As part of a flurry of executive orders in President Trump’s first days in office, he issued one that revoked a Biden administration executive order on “Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.” The Biden order resulted in a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy task force report that spurred updates to scientific integrity policies across the federal government.

The Trump executive order defines “gold standard science” as “reproducible, transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, collaborative and interdisciplinary, skeptical of its findings and assumptions, structured for falsifiability of hypotheses, subject to unbiased peer review, accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and without conflicts of interest.”

The executive order requires agencies to make publicly available the data, models, and analyses that comprise scientific and technical information that informs decision making. Federal agencies would also be required to note uncertainties and be transparent about the assumptions used.

In addition, when scientific evidence is used for decision making, agencies would be required to use a weight of scientific evidence approach. This approach is defined in the executive order as a “scientific evaluation in which each piece of relevant information is considered based on its quality and relevance, and then transparently integrated with other relevant information to inform the scientific evaluation prior to making a judgment about the scientific evaluation.”

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is required to issue guidance within 30 days of the executive order that federal agencies would align with updates to scientific integrity policies that include any revisions that were made during the Biden administration.