Trump Administration Rescinds First Scientific Integrity Policy

The decision prioritizes politics over science

The Trump administration rescinded the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) scientific integrity policy on March 20^th, 2025. The decision opens the door to political interference in agency science.

What impact will this have?

What is scientific integrity anyway?

Simply put, scientific integrity is adherence to ethical principles and professional standards in conducting, reporting, and applying scientific research. It ensures that science remains credible, objective, transparent, and free from political or commercial influence.

Scientific integrity saves lives

A strong scientific integrity policy could have prevented the national opioid crisis. This is a bold statement, but it’s true.

Records show that Dr. Curtis Wright, a medical officer for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) coordinated with Purdue Pharmaceuticals to sideline scientific evidence showing the opioid drug, OxyContin, was highly addictive. OxyContin was thus approved by the FDA and triggered the first wave of deaths linked to legally prescribed opioids in the mid-1990s. More than 500,000 people have died from an opioid overdose since 1999.

Scientific integrity policies provide a means for individuals inside and outside of federal agencies to ask for an investigation of suspected cases of political interference in science. In the case of OxyContin, it’s possible that a scientific integrity policy could have provided the means for a scientist, nonprofit organization, or an expert in the FDA to ask for an investigation into Dr. Wright’s conclusions. But in the mid-1990s, scientific integrity was not what we think of it as today, and federal agencies had not formalized policies regarding political interference in science. It took instances of political interference in science, such as FDA’s decision to approve OxyContin, to fully understand the need to formalize policies and processes on scientific integrity. And over the past two decades, we have worked to strengthen scientific integrity policies and processes across the federal government.

While NIH is primarily an agency that funds biomedical research, its research also informs policy. Without a scientific integrity policy in-place, the Trump administration could politicize the science that NIH funds or conducts. And that could subsequently affect policy decisions that impact our lives.

We have seen the Trump administration politicize science at the NIH before. For example, they discontinued all NIH research involving fetal tissue for political, not scientific, reasons. Fetal tissue is critical to life-saving research on treatment of diseases such as HIV and Alzheimer’s.

Anytime would be a bad time to undo scientific integrity policies and standards at an agency, but right now is a particularly disastrous time to unravel scientific integrity at the NIH. There is a real possibility of a major bird flu outbreak across the nation. Additionally, we’re seeing a significant increase in measle cases. It seems we’d want science unfettered from political interference to inform our responses to health-related crises – not politics.

Which scientific integrity policy will be next?

SciLight editors suspected that the Trump administration would rescind scientific integrity policies and processes, so the action at NIH was not a surprise. A paper by a small organization, The Council to Modernize Governance, painted a roadmap to undo scientific integrity policies. The organization’s board includes David Bernhardt, Trump’s former Secretary of the Department of Interior, who was not a fan of scientific integrity. Additionally, this roadmap to undo scientific integrity was cited in letters sent to agencies from the House Oversight Committee, which incorrectly stated that scientific integrity policies were a tool to prevent Trump from implementing his agenda. Of course, this would only be true if Trump wanted to suppress or alter scientific results and pretend his policies were supported by science when there was a strong weight of evidence to the contrary. The Trump administration’s decision to disband its first ever advisory committee on scientific integrity is another indicator that it doesn’t intend to embrace scientific integrity as a principle or a policy in our federal agencies.

While NIH’s policy was the first to be cut, we predict that it won’t be the last. Given the Trump administration’s past record, we will likely see politicized agency science at an unprecedented level. And when these policies are cut, agency scientists and experts will have no formal recourse to call out cases of political interference in science.

This means that scientists will be censored, and science will be manipulated or sidelined in decision-making. The independent science that once informed standards about clean air and water and decisions about vaccinations, wildlife conservation, medical drug approvals, and our response to climate change, as well as critical decisions on what scientific research is needed will be replaced by political whims or fringe science. Our environment will degrade, climate change will be unchecked, and people will suffer.

If scientific integrity policies and practices are lost under this administration, it will be even more critical to show our support for the federal workers and scientists who remain. They will carry a heavy burden to uphold a culture of scientific integrity, and to document scientific integrity violations as they witness them. And as they continue to serve the public and defend science-informed decisions that protect us all, we will stand up to defend them. We must.

That’s it for today - Thank you so much for reading SciLight!

If you enjoyed today’s post, please like it or share it with others. You can also support the work we do to shine a light on the politicization of science by becoming a paid subscriber!

If you want to share today’s post as a web page with your network, click this button:

If you have suggestions, questions, comments, or want to drop us a line - send it all to scilightsubstack@gmail.com