President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.
Thus, STAT News – owned by Boston Globe Media, operating as a for-profit media outlet focused on health, medicine and life sciences and funded by Big Pharma and biotech firm ads – claimed that “Trump’s ‘gold standard’ order is a blueprint for politicising science”. According to the New York Times, the executive order puts Trump’s political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to “correct scientific information”, control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.
In an open letter boasting 9,700 signatures (of which 2,700 chose to keep their information private), a group called ‘Stand Up for Science‘ compared President Trump’s executive order to the Lysenko affair – which condemned millions to starvation by conducting bogus genetic research in the Soviet Union – and the ‘science’ of eugenics in state-sponsored programmes in Nazi Germany which led to the genocide of millions of Jews, people with disabilities and homosexuals.
In the no-holds-barred confrontation between President Trump and his detractors, starting even before his first term in office, comparing him to Hitler and Stalin is par for the course and should elicit no surprises among observers. But in a hyperbolic and highly charged political climate, President Trump’s latest executive order may go down as one of the most consequential policy interventions in defence of scientific integrity.
It does not seek to suppress speech, cancel dissidents or blacklist platforms. It does something far more radical: it demands that science — particularly in contested domains like climate change and public health — return to first principles. It insists that government-funded science must meet the highest standards of evidence, transparency and falsifiability. That’s not censorship; it’s scientific sobriety.
Far from undermining science, this order represents a necessary corrective to the pervasive problem of regulatory capture – the process by which regulatory agencies become dominated by the interests of those they are charged with regulating, rather than the public interest. As George Stigler, the Nobel laureate economist, argued in his seminal work on regulatory capture, bureaucracies often serve the interests of the regulated rather than the public good. In areas like climate and health policy, this dynamic has fuelled propaganda masquerading as science, necessitating a return to the philosopher Karl Popper’s gold standard of falsifiability to restore trust and integrity.
The Crisis of Trust in Science
Public trust in science has plummeted in recent years, and for good reason. The executive order cites a “reproducibility crisis” as evidence of a broader malaise. The crisis, also known as the replication or replicability crisis, refers to the growing number of published scientific results that other researchers have been unable to reproduce or verify. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories that build on them and can call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Centre finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there’s been a continued decline in public trust in scientists. Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society, down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak. This erosion stems from repeated instances where scientific claims, particularly in climate and health, have been manipulated to serve political ends.
The executive order highlights examples from the Biden administration, such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 school-reopening guidance, which was edited by the American Federation of Teachers to discourage in-person learning, leading to detrimental educational outcomes. Through emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the backroom dealings between a powerful government agency and a powerful public sector labour union was exposed by the New York Post.
Regulatory Capture and the Corruption of Science
This example of the corruption of science by regulatory capture crisis is not merely anecdotal. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) notes that the federal government, as the world’s largest funder of scientific research, has “supercharged” the reproducibility crisis by subsidising studies which support reigning narratives, allowing activist bureaucrats to commission research that justifies radical regulations. The result is a scientific ecosystem where truth is subordinated to power, as Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture predicts. When agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) align with corporate, academic or ideological interests, the public suffers.
Regulatory agencies such as the CDC, over time, come to serve the interests of the industries or groups they regulate rather than the public. This dynamic is evident in climate and health policy, where entrenched interests — be they green energy corporations, pharmaceutical giants or activist scientists — shape narratives to secure funding, influence policy or maintain power. In climate science, for instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its associated models have been criticised for exaggerating catastrophic scenarios to justify sweeping economic interventions. Dr John Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Physics Laureate, has called the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption of science” that threatens global economies and billions of lives.
Clauser’s critique, echoed by other Nobel laureates like Ivar Giaever and Robert Laughlin, points to the pseudoscientific nature of much climate research. He argues that climate models, which underpin global policy, are based on flawed assumptions and fail to account for natural forces like cloud cover, which he estimates is underestimated by a factor of 100 to 200. These models, far from being falsifiable, are often treated as sacrosanct, with dissenters silenced, as Clauser himself experienced when his IMF talk was abruptly cancelled after he challenged the climate crisis narrative. This is a textbook case of regulatory capture, where the scientific or policy establishments, funded by government grants, suppresses alternative viewpoints to maintain grip on policies preferred by favoured constituencies.
In health policy, the ‘noble lie’ has become a disturbing justification for scientific misconduct. Some activist scientists argue that exaggerating risks or suppressing inconvenient data is acceptable if it ensures public compliance with policies they deem necessary. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when public health officials, backed by pharmaceutical interests, downplayed uncertainties in public health science to push universal mandates. For instance, throughout much of 2020-2022, the CDC and NIH largely ignored or minimised the protective effect of natural immunity from prior infection.
Karl Popper’s Gold Standard: Falsifiability as the Antidote
The antidote to this corruption lies in returning to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which defines the gold standard as falsifiability. Popper argued that for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be testable and capable of being proven false through empirical observation. Popper’s approach demands scepticism and transparency, rejecting claims that cannot be rigorously tested. President Trump’s executive order explicitly embraces this standard, defining “Gold Standard Science” as research that is reproducible, transparent, falsifiable, subject to unbiased peer review and free from conflicts of interest.
In climate science, for example, the IPCC’s reliance on models that continually predict higher temperatures beyond those empirically observed violates Popper’s criterion. Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. Of course, none of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. Similarly, in health policy, the refusal to engage with data on vaccine side effects or alternative treatments during COVID-19 reflects a rejection of falsifiability in favour of dogma.
The National Association of Scholars endorses the executive order for committing federal policy to countering the reproducibility crisis, noting that it “places the weight of the federal government on the side of ensuring that scientific research provides true knowledge about the natural world”. By requiring agencies to adopt policies that prioritise falsifiability and transparency, the order aims to dismantle the structures that enable regulatory capture. This is a direct challenge to the entrenched interests — green energy firms, Big Pharma, academic institutions and activist scientists — who benefit from a system that rewards conformity over truth.
Critics of the executive order claim that the order ‘hijacks’ scientific language to undermine rigour. These critics, however, ignore the irony: their defence of the status quo protects a system already captured by ideological and corporate interests. The fear of ‘political interference’ is a red herring when the current system already allows bureaucrats and special interests to manipulate science for their gain. Stigler’s insight reminds us that regulatory capture thrives in the absence of accountability, and the order’s emphasis on transparency and falsifiability is a direct counter to this. The politicised role of state agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior in pushing the Biden administration’s green agenda has been widely noted in these pages and elsewhere.
Compare the Situation with the EU
It is instructive to briefly compare President Trump’s efforts at inculcating gold standard science in government-sponsored research with the situation in the Europe Union. Under Ursula von der Leyen’s leadership, the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and AI Act collectively enable the EU Commission to police content on social media platforms like X and TikTok. Posts that contradict ‘authoritative sources’ on issues like climate, COVID-19 or energy transition can be algorithmically demoted, removed or even criminally sanctioned by the EU’s digital commissars.
Von der Leyen defends these draconian steps as necessary to combat disinformation — but what she’s really fighting is narrative pluralism in the marketplace of ideas, since the science is already ‘settled’. A particularly egregious example of the authoritarian approach to the ‘settled science’ was exhibited by the often grinning Jacinda Ardern, who claimed before stepping down as New Zealand’s Prime Minister that her government was the “sole source of truth” in public health issues during the Covid lockdowns. She naturally got rewarded for her Covid response, first with a damehood awarded by Prince William during a ceremony in the UK and then by the United Nations as the ‘Champion for Global Change’ which recognises “extraordinary individuals and organisations whose work embodies the values and purposes of the UN”.
Conclusion: Speaking Truth to Power
President Trump’s executive order on “Gold Standard Science” is not an attack on science but a defence of its core principles. By anchoring federal policy in making scientific research reproducible, transparent and falsifiable, it seeks to liberate science from the clutches of regulatory capture. The order confronts a scientific establishment that, in areas like climate and health, has too often justified policies that serve vested interests over the public good. As scientists such as John Clauser and others have shown, the cost of this corruption is not just economic but existential, threatening the credibility of science itself.
The path forward is clear: federal agencies must adopt rigorous, transparent and falsifiable standards to ensure that science serves truth, not power. Critics may decry the order as political overreach, but their protests defend a system that has already been politicised by entrenched interests. For the sake of the public, the economy and the integrity of science, Trump’s executive order is a necessary step toward restoring trust and accountability. Let us hope it marks the beginning of a new era where science is once again a beacon of truth, not a tool of propaganda.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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So I read through the list of signatories. I choked on my coffee seeing No 9 – (Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania – my italics).
I then observed (and the woke feminists can look away now) that a lot of the names on the list are girlies who don’t seem to have any scientific credentials. I concluded these are simply haters of the arch-misogynist Trump.
Probably right. It’s the same as the anti-ICE protests in California now. Who could argue with deporting illegal economic immigrants who provide very little to the country, except for drug smuggling and rape?
They’d protest, riot, loot and kill even if Trump declared it ‘National Cuddle a Puppy’ day.
To summarise: a group of ideologically committed neo-Lysenkoists complains that being forced to return to real science is neo-Lysenkoism. Fantastic. This is “the iron law of woke projection” in practice.
Maybe Karl Popper is not the right authority to appeal to today, as Popper argued that censorship and suppression were justified, and some of his reasoning is being re-gurgitated, in a more childish form, to justify the new totalitarianism of today.
For somebody who had lived through Naziism and the Holocaust, it is tragic that Popper failed to understand that the truth does not need the jackboot of the state to defend it, and that ideas that need the help of the jackboot to suppress criticism, are probably not good ideas to begin with.
Popper’s more eneral political opinions are irrelevant for his statements about proper scientific theories. He didn’t ask for the jackboot of the state to decide about so-called scientifc truths but stated that a proper scientific theory must be falsifiable by empiric experiments and that anything which cannot be checked by real world experiments cannot be called a scientific theory.
The concept of Empiricism goes back to the Enlightenment at least.
You cannot have true empiricism as long as certain questions or trains of thought are off limits. Popper was a fraud.
This article refers Popper’s requirements for scientifc theories. That you generally don’t like the guy for whatever reasons is irrelevant for this.
Apart from that, your statement also doesn’t make sense: Empiricism is not about determining truth by trains of thought – that would be idealism – but about observing real-world phenomenons. It’s perfectly compatible with considering certain ideas, eg, that gravity could suddenfly switch its direction and thay we’ll all be pushed into space because of this, off limits.
Empricism also means that no line of curiosity is off limits, and that there are no areas of science or knowledge that are so sacrosanct that they may not be questioned. Popper failed to live up to his own standards, and is today the poster boy of the pro censorship camp who use him to justify arbitrary limitations to free speech and investigation.
You keep writing about something completely different than what’s referred to in the text and that’s still as completely irrelevant. Popper’s statements exist independent of him and you’d need to criticize these and not his life.
The concept of empiricism in science existed long before Popper. So why introduce him into the argument at all?
See previous comment. As that’s obviously looping, I’ll keep it at that.
“… anything which cannot be checked by real world experiments …”
That should include releasing data, and allowing disagreement to be aired, on TV.
An article about “gold standards in science” ought to get its basic facts right, much as hate-driven false statements about Germans might be very much en vogue. Eugenics is the idea to improve humanity by selective breeding, similar to what’s being applied to animals or plants. It has no relation to
¹ Being aware of this, I was originally mildly shocked when I encountered the English term antisocial behaviour for the first time.
My wife is German and she relates that her grandfather was a schoolteacher during the Nazi period and had several disabled children in his class. There were very clear threats against those children, and on at least one occasion he had to hide them when the premises were raided.
You’ll find a lot of Germans telling all kinds of wild stories about the NS regime. Much as you’ll also find a lot US democrats telling all kinds of wild stories about Donald Trump. But the actual details are documented and a general persecution of people with disabilities – which would have included a lot of war veterans, by the way – didn’t exist.
BTW, I see no particular reason why I should believe that you actually have a wife, that the wife you perhaps have is actually German. that her grandfather really told her this and that she really told it to you as countering factual claims with unverifiable authoritative-seeming anecdotes is a pretty standard disinformation tactic.
You can chose to doubt what i say because it doe not fit into your pre-conceived notion. So be it. That is your right.
The nazis distinguished between different types of disabilities and war veterans were definitely seen in a different light than those with genetic (or assumed genetic) disabilities.
Neither of us as provided any evidence but evidence for my statement is easily available, eg,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
despite one has to read a little between the lines as Wikipedia is heavily politicised and generally not a reliable source for German history of the first half of the 20th century. The text also conflates different things, namely, killing of newborn with severe birth defects (that would be eugenics) and killing of people considered incurably sick and in critical condition by a committee of medical experts appointed for this purpose.
A translation of the Euthansia order (pictured on Wikipedia) could be:
Reichsleader Bohler and Dr. med. Brand have been given responsibility and oversight for authorizing certain doctors who shall be named to put people who are, insofar human consideration goes, incurably sick and in a critical state, out of their misery.
In practice, this affected a lot of people in mental asylums as treatment of mental diseases hadn’t been progressed much beyond lock them up to keep them from harming themselves or others at that time.
There was no general campaign against disabled people eg, people who were deaf or blind or wheelchair bound, what most other people think of when they hear the term disabled and certainly the impression to people quoting this without further qualification wanted to make.
—-
It’s inherently impossible to provide evidence for your anecdote, however, it comes with severe improbabilities:
Eugenics was the great scientific cause of the Left in the early 20th century, and all the leftwing dictatorships espoused it. For example, Trotsky wrote in 1924, “socialist organization … will make it [possible] to … create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman” (from Literature and Revolution, 1924).
Not only the left. It was generally very much en vogue at that time because they idea that people could objectively be classifed as more or less valuable didn’t seem so revolting to people of this period as it nowadays does to us.
NB: I do mean this. As autist, I’m guaranteed to be classfied as less valuable, midlly put, by a real lot of people.
Afterthought: Schutzhaft is probably better translated preventive or proactive custody as the idea was not to protect the people who were permantently incarcerated but to protect society from them.
The Nazis entertained the idea that people in forced labour could be reintegrated into society, after having atoned for their wrongdoings through hard manual work for a certain period. This is the literal meaning of the sometimes misunderstood “Arbeit macht frei”.
I’m not so sure about that, although I don’t really have reliable sources about this. In general, people put into preventive custody were meant to remain there.
And that explains the attitudes of those who will lose out on easy money.
If this Order had been signed by a Democrat President everyone would be hailing it as a victory for science and common sense. Not, of course, that it would have been, but the furore is another example of the “Trump did it, so it must be bad by definition “ argument.
“The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.”——Is that a joke? Almost all climate science is funded by GOVERNMENT. The same governments that are using climate change fear to control the masses and their consumptions of resources and also redistribute the worlds wealth. —-We have no “transparency” in climate science. It is all politicised dogma. Trump is attempting to bring integrity back to science and stop it being a tool of government to impose its will on the public.