Science: Soon Under Government Censorship in the US

Don't you dare cheat on us again, you silly scientists!

From the Executive Order of the President, “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” Section 1. Policy and Purpose. “Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly. A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis. The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research. Unfortunately, the Federal Government has contributed to this loss of trust.”

The Trump administration officially acknowledged what most of us knew but many denied. Science is in trouble. It faces a reproducibility crisis, falsified data, corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and often sloppy or insignificant research. There is still plenty of serious and innovative science, but it’s becoming harder to fight for good science against the mounting wave of bad science.

So, Science badly needed a reform, but scientists consistently refused to engage in that. Not surprisingly, because it is well known that social structures are normally impossible to reform from the inside. Hence, things went from bad to worse, and the COVID-19 crisis was the last blow that caused the whole ivory tower to collapse. The crash is taking everything with it, even serious, documented, and necessary science. The consequences will be dire: we needed a reform, but what we got was censorship.

Trump’s administration has come out with the idea of “gold standard science,” as you can read in the executive order by the president issued on May 23, 2025 (incidentally, on the day of Ugo Bard’s birthday. Might Mr. Trump read the Seneca blog? :-))

The text of the order is short; you can read it in a few minutes. It contains plenty of good intentions; nothing really original. Science must be transparent, there must be no conflicts of interest, it has to give space to different viewpoints, etc. All things known to be the characteristics of good science, or at least should be.

The worrisome part starts with the COVID-19 story from the first paragraph that says, “Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly.” And then mentioning the closure of schools, apparently, one of the oppressive measures that has most outraged the public. But note that they don’t mention vaccines, still a controversial point.

From COVID, the text jumps to climate science, accused of using “Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenario 8.5 to assess the potential effects of climate change in a “higher” warming scenario.”

Here we see a bright (nearly blinding) example of how politicians and the public alike don’t understand what a “scenario” is. The mere fact that you can calculate a “worst case” scenario is understood as implying that you are using it to terrorize the public. It happened already with the “Limits to Growth” study of 1972, when the existence in the report of a scenario of rapid resource exhaustion, explicitly defined as “not realistic” by the authors, was sufficient to declare the study “wrong” and the define the authors as scaremongers.

The problem is that during the COVID pandemic, worst-case scenarios were created and disseminated with the explicit purpose of scaring the public and bringing money and power to those who profited from the pandemic. And, in a sense, it is understandable that the public reacted by tarring with the same brush both sloppy medical research and serious climate science.

And here we are. The Government is now making a very clear statement. It is not explicitly written in the document, but you can easily understand it. It is:

DON’T YOU DARE CHEAT ON US AGAIN, YOU SILLY SCIENTISTS

In other words, scaring people to gain power is the government’s job. They are professionals at that, and you know what to expect when you invade the turf of some big boss.

Now, the axe is falling. How exactly will it hit? The order doesn’t contain any specific definition of how “gold standard” science can be determined. It is all left to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which will “issue guidance for agencies on implementation of Gold Standard Science.” Evidently, the office, or the agencies it coordinates, will certify which scientific papers and reports qualify for the “Gold Standard” rules.

It is a form of censorship that could range from mild to draconian. In any case, it is censorship. The government will not endorse or pay for publications that don’t satisfy the gold standard rules. Scientists may not be forbidden to publish what they want, but, if they do, they will lose government funding, maybe their job, and their salary.

It is normal in history that governments and institutions want to have their say on what is done with their money. For instance, the Catholic Church’s Holy Office, now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was charged with ‘maintaining vigilance over the printed word.’ Galileo Galilei had a little row with them, as we all know.

As another example: during the Soviet Era, many scientific laboratories in the USSR had a party officer “embedded” with research groups, charged with ensuring that the work was performed according to the orthodox Communist views. In Western science, although scientists are theoretically freer, in practice, there are formal and informal gatekeepers ensuring that undesired ideas are not published in high-level journals or, if they are by mistake, they will soon be “retracted.” Dmitri Orlov has often noted parallels between the Soviet Union and Western systems in his Reinventing Collapse book (2008). This executive order proves him right: the West is moving one step closer to becoming a new version of the old USSR.

Maybe what’s happening was unavoidable. It is part of the way the universe works: human-made structures tend to decay and crumble, it is called the “Seneca Effect” (“growth is slow, but ruin is rapid”). Science has evolved into something that badly needs a shake-up. It might be even beneficial, if not exaggerated. Besides, rules are made to be circumvented, and censorship didn’t prevent Soviet science from reaching high levels of excellence. And, as usual, the future has the ultimate word when it becomes the present.

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See also this article on “The Guardian” aptly titled “The ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it”