President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing federal agencies to focus on scientific research that is reproducible and falsifiable, a major overhaul that could disrupt much of the scientific and medical establishments.

Senior White House officials touted the order Friday as a return to “gold standard science.” They said in a call with reporters that declines in disruptive, innovating research, along with a growing distrust in the scientific and medical establishment following the COVID-19 pandemic, requires a recommitment to the basic principles of unbiased and interdisciplinary scientific advancement.

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“The status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust,” White House Director of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios told reporters ahead of the executive order signing Friday afternoon. 

Officials said that the executive order directs federally funded scientists to focus on “reproducible, transparent, and falsifiable” results,” to better implement robust peer review processes, and to rid research of conflicts of interest. 

The phrase “gold standard science” is a feature of the Make America Healthy Again agenda championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his quest to steer the federal public health juggernaut toward discovering the root causes of chronic disease. 

The first report of the federal MAHA Commission, published on Thursday and ordered by Trump in February, references “gold standard” science and medicine seven times across 70 pages discussing the rise of chronic disease rates in children. 

Much of the initial MAHA report emphasized the role of the pharmaceutical and food industries in funding biomedical and nutrition research, contributing to a dearth of evidence of the underlying causes of various neurodevelopmental and autoimmune conditions.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said during a press call on the MAHA report Thursday that the “corporate influence in the scientific literature” has in part contributed to a lack of reliability of experimentation on which to build good science. He also said that corporate influences have contributed to a culture among scientists in which they avoid asking inconvenient questions. 

“Scientists are often afraid to ask fundamental questions for fear that they might get an answer that leads to them being smeared by the press, being attacked by scientists, and losing their reputation,” Bhattacharya said Thursday. 

Bhattacharya, who was a researcher at Stanford University before being tapped to lead NIH, was one of a coalition of scientists who were criticized in the media and among fellow academics for their criticism of COVID-19 restrictions during the pandemic. 

But much of the scientific community has been very critical of the Trump administration’s pause or outright cuts to grant research projects across universities nationwide funded by the NIH and other research funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation. 

Early into Trump’s tenure, the NIH took steps to significantly reduce indirect cost outlays for grant projects, which support infrastructure costs related to research such as facilities, maintenance, equipment, and security. 

These cuts have been better absorbed by Ivy League institutions with large endowments, but they have particularly hit state schools with large biomedical research facilities, such as the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Alabama. 

During appropriations hearings before Congress this week, Kennedy told members of Congress that the administration is working better funding mechanisms for expensive equipment at state universities without large endowments. 

Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 also cuts NIH funding by 40%, citing distrust in the medical establishment as a leading reason for the austerity.

Still others within the research community are concerned about the administration’s efforts to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI policies, saying that this has had a chilling effect on certain areas of research.

In March, nearly 2,000 academic scientists in the United States wrote an open letter regarding the Trump administration’s policies on funding and DEI have produced “a climate of fear.” 

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“If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge,” wrote the scientists in March, adding that the damage to the extant research ecosystem “could take decades to reverse.”