President Biden declared in a January memorandum that it be “the policy of my administration to make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”

The memo, which creates a task force and directs some directors to ensure some things, is the formal institution of the “trust the science” message into policy. By itself, it’s a harmless thing to declare, but observers ought to take notice that “trust the science” is functionally a political axiom. It’s really more of a way of posturing about whom to trust — me and my people, not the other guy and his people. It doesn’t offer a functional method for interpreting or understanding what the best science actually says, especially on questions that are harder to answer.