Gold standard science isn't gold standard if it's applied selectively. Part 1: Firearms injuries

In May, the White House produced a report called "Restoring Gold Standard Science", which was followed by an NIH plan to implement this policy. The initial report pointed to the well-attested problems with reproducibility in science, and to high-profile cases of research fraud, and recommended nine requirements for Gold Standard science. It must be: 

(i) reproducible;

(ii) transparent; 
(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty; 
(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary; 
(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions; 
(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses; 
(vii) subject to unbiased peer review; 
(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and 
(ix) without conflicts of interest. 

This is a clever move by the Trump administration because it's hard to make a coherent case against such a policy without appearing to question whether science should be done to high standards. Nevertheless, many scientists are concerned. The main issue is the mismatch between what the government is doing, in terms of defunding science, stopping grants, firing competent people and appointing incompetent cronies in their place, and the lofty ambitions stated in the plan (see, e.g., this blogpost). This leads to suspicion of the motives of those behind Gold Standard Science, which is seen as attempt to weaponise science policy in order to attack science that it doesn't like. 

This is credible given recent history. Take the requirement for transparency. Back in 2016, Stephan Lewandowsky and I wrote an opinion piece for Nature entitled Don't Let Transparency Damage Science, noting that politicians who didn't like climate science or tobacco research were tying researchers up in red tape with spurious demands for data. In 2018, I blogged about a proposal for Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that stated that policy should only be based on research that has openly available public data. This would allow government to dismiss regulations concerning substances such as asbestos or pesticides, where data was gathered long before open data was a thing. Similarly, if we were to argue that a result must be shown to be reproducible before it can influence policy, then politicians can justify ignoring inconvenient findings from studies that are not easy to reproduce, such as those involving long time-scales or complex methods. 

Doing science well is much harder than doing it badly; it takes time and expertise to pre-register a study, to work out the best protocol, to design an analysis to reduce bias, and to make data and scripts open and useable. I'm strongly in favour of all of those things, but, like many others, I am suspicious that demands for adherence to the highest standards may be used selectively to impede or even terminate research that the administration doesn't like. 

I was accordingly interested to see how Gold Standard Science was referenced in plans for government-funded research in this mammoth report from the US Senate Committee on Appropriations, which was posted on July 31st 2025, a couple of months after the Gold Standard Science document was written. Pages 105-172 cover the National Institutes for Health, and discuss funding for numerous health conditions. I could find just one paragraph where the importance of open data or pre-registration was mentioned, and it was this one: 

Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention.—The Committee provides $12,500,000 to conduct research on firearm injury and mortality prevention. Given violence and suicide have a number of causes, the Committee recommends NIH take a comprehensive approach to studying these underlying causes and evidence-based methods of prevention of injury, including crime prevention. All grantees under this section will be required to fulfill requirements around open data, open code, pre-registration of research projects, and open access to research articles consistent with the National Science Foundation’s open science principles. The Director is to report to the Committees within 30 days of enactment of this act on implementation schedules and procedures for grant awards, which strive to ensure that such awards support ideologically and politically unbiased research projects. 

I found this odd. Surely, if the Bhattacharya plan is to be believed, the statements about compliance with open science principles should apply to all the research done by NIH? Yet a search of the document finds that only this paragraph (repeated in two sections) makes any mention of such practice, and this happens to concern a topic, firearms injuries, that is a contentious political issue. 

So I'm all in favour of Gold Standard Science as described in the Bhattacharya plan, but let's see these principles be applied even-handedly and not just to research that might give uncomfortable results.