“Restoring Gold Standard Science”: The Presidential Politics of Scientific Integrity in Comparative and Historical Perspective

• In Event: Truth Under Siege: Science in an Era of Executive Power

Abstract

Amid the climate change denialism of the Bush-Cheney administration, advocates outside of government called for safeguards against political distortions of science, a then-nascent policy agenda they termed “scientific integrity.” The chief question they raised was as follows: How can policymakers prevent science from manipulation or suppression when it contradicts political agendas? Tracing this policy agenda over time, I examine its ascendency within the White House during the Obama-Biden administration and its recursive development across subsequent administrations, including the Trump-Vance administration’s current working of the issue as a matter of “restoring gold standard science.” I ask: How has executive power been wielded in the name of “scientific integrity” and towards what ends? How has this shifted over time and varied across presidential administrations? Drawing on analysis of presidential actions, policy documents, associated commentary in the scientific literature and mainstream media, ethnographic data collected at science policy events, and interviews with policymakers, I argue that battles over scientific integrity have become a central arena of presidential politics in the twenty-first century United States. I trace two major transformations in this White House-level policy arena. First, whereas Democratic administrations have framed scientific integrity as primarily a problem of exogenous political interference into scientific affairs, the Trump-Vance administration has reframed the issue as a problem of science’s endemic flaws, pointing to examples like the research reproducibility crisis. Second, the presidential politics of scientific integrity has expanded from an early focus on climate science to, especially during and following the pandemic, a more sweeping set of politicized scientific domains, from vaccines to debates about biology, sex, and gender identity. By situating White House scientific integrity policymaking in comparative and historical perspective, this paper shows how executive power has been exercised over science in distinct ways that promulgate competing diagnoses of how scientific “truth” is distorted.

Author

• Jorge Ochoa, Northwestern University