The science reform movement—which aims to improve the rigor of research—has unwittingly handed the administration of President Donald Trump a way to attack science, critics say.
Trump’s executive order calling for “gold standard science”—widely interpreted as an attempt to target findings that are inconsistent with the administration’s political agenda—was a foreseeable outcome of a movement that overstated the problems in science, according to some researchers. But science reformers say integrity concerns are too crucial to tamp down over fears of misuse.
The 23 May order points to a “reproducibility crisis” and high-profile cases of data falsification. It calls for science to be transparent and reproducible, and to acknowledge uncertainty. Those goals are familiar to Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit that has pushed to improve science through measures such as sharing data openly and describing a study plan in full before embarking on it. But 6 days after Trump signed the order, COS released a statement describing the dangers it poses and how its goals depart from those of the reform movement.
