President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing federal agencies to focus on scientific research that is reproducible and falsifiable, a major overhaul that could disrupt much of the scientific and medical establishments.
Senior White House officials touted the order Friday as a return to “gold-standard science.” They said in a call with reporters that declines in disruptive, innovative research, along with a growing distrust in the scientific and medical establishments following the COVID-19 pandemic, require a recommitment to the basic principles of unbiased and interdisciplinary scientific advancement.
“The status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources, and public distrust,” White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios said ahead of the executive order signing Friday afternoon.
Officials said the executive order directs federally funded scientists to focus on “reproducible, transparent, and falsifiable” results to implement robust peer review processes better and to rid research of conflicts of interest.
The phrase “gold-standard science” is a feature of the Make America Healthy Again agenda championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his quest to steer the federal public health juggernaut toward discovering the root causes of chronic disease.
The first report of the federal MAHA Commission, published on Thursday and ordered by Trump in February, references “gold-standard” science and medicine seven times across 70 pages discussing the rise of chronic disease rates in children.
Much of the initial MAHA report emphasizes the role of the pharmaceutical and food industries in funding biomedical and nutrition research, contributing to a dearth of evidence of the underlying causes of various neurodevelopmental and autoimmune conditions.
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said during a press call Thursday on the MAHA report that the “corporate influence in the scientific literature” has partly contributed to a lack of reliability of experimentation on which to build good science. He also said corporate influences have contributed to a culture among scientists in which they avoid asking inconvenient questions.
“Scientists are often afraid to ask fundamental questions for fear that they might get an answer that leads to them being smeared by the press, being attacked by scientists, and losing their reputation,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya, who was a researcher at Stanford University before being tapped to lead the NIH, was part of a coalition of scientists who were criticized in the media and among fellow academics for opposing COVID-19 restrictions during the pandemic.
However, much of the scientific community has been very critical of the Trump administration’s pause or outright cuts to grant research projects funded by the NIH across universities nationwide and other research funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation.
Early in Trump’s tenure, the NIH took steps to significantly reduce indirect cost outlays for grant projects, which support infrastructure costs related to research, such as facilities, maintenance, equipment, and security.
These cuts have been better absorbed by Ivy League institutions with large endowments, but they have particularly hit state schools with large biomedical research facilities, such as the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Alabama.
During appropriations hearings this week, Kennedy told members of Congress that the administration is developing better funding mechanisms for expensive equipment at state universities without large endowments.
Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal 2026 also cuts NIH funding by 40%, citing distrust in the medical establishment as a leading reason for the austerity.
Still others within the research community are concerned about the administration’s efforts to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, saying it has had a chilling effect on certain areas of research.
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In March, nearly 2,000 academic scientists in the United States wrote an open letter regarding the Trump administration’s policies on funding and DEI, which they said have produced “a climate of fear.”
“If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge,” the scientists said, adding that the damage to the extant research ecosystem “could take decades to reverse.”
