This is an article from the June 2025 Civitas Examiner (Volume 2, No. 3) and was written by one of our students, Reid F. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. To read more Civitas Examiner stories or to submit your own, click here.
On June 24, the White House published an article titled “It is Possible to Support Science and Hold it Accountable at the Same Time.” The article defended President Trump’s May 23 executive order titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” which stated that “a majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis.” The executive order gives examples of a projection of the Representative Concentration Pathway scenario 8.5, which assesses potential effects of climate change, and recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of conditions to reopen schools during the COVID-19 pandemic as examples of supposedly misleading uses of science.
There is some justification for this belief in a crisis of poorly done or falsified science. There have been many recent incidents of scientific fraud and misconduct in the US, leading many to state that, as H. Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of Science journals put it, the “replicability crisis” has “created the impression that unreliable research is widespread and not reproducible.”
However, much of the scientific community has criticized Trump’s executive order. David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, and Wendy Wagner, the Richard Dale Endowed Chair at the University of Texas’s School of Law, claimed in a editorial for Science, that the executive order “officially empowers political appointees to override conclusions and interpretations of government scientists.” Their editorial endorses H.R. 1106: Scientific Integrity Act, which seeks to amend the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act to establish scientific integrity policies for federal agencies.
In some ways, H.R. 1106 is similar to the “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order. Both claim to have a goal of preventing science from being censored and politicized. One of the central differences is that Trump’s executive order, unlike H.R. 1106, alleges that “Actions taken by the prior Administration further politicized science, for example, by encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.” Another difference is that the executive order has a focus on preventing “highly unlikely and overly precautionary assumptions and scenarios,” that appears to be at least partially to avoid the discussion of the worst-case scenarios of problems such as climate change, such as Representative Concentration Pathway scenario 8.5.
H.R. 1106, meanwhile, does not mention diversity or seek to prevent scientists from exploring worst-case scenarios. It instead focuses on preventing federal employees from “intimidating or coercing an individual to alter or censor, attempting to intimidate or coerce an individual to alter or censor, or retaliating against an individual for failure to alter or censor, scientific or technical findings.” It also aims to prevent the acceptance of scientific conclusions that are based on political considerations and the hiring of any covered individual, other than political appointees, “on the basis of political consideration or ideology.”
The “It is Possible to Support Science and Hold It Accountable at the Same Time” article states that “there is a disconnect between the American people and the scientific enterprise.” This is clearly an opinion held across the political spectrum, as shown by the similarities between an executive order by a Republican president and a House bill that is cosponsored by 115 Democrats and only a single Republican. The difference is in what people think it means to hold science accountable, and what they want to hold it accountable to.
