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“My Administration is committed to restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, and that Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available,” says the “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order that President Donald Trump signed on May 23.
“We must restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained.”
Six days after the president affixed his signature to this declaration, one of the most important federal agencies contradicted it.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released its “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) report. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, chaired the MAHA Commission, a 14-person group that also included U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and National Institutes of Health director Jayanta Bhattacharya. Trump established the commission in February via Executive Order 14212. The 73-page MAHA report commits to showing “the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends.”
One major problem makes data presented therein inexcusably suspect.
The commission revised the document after NOTUS, a nonprofit organization, discovered several citations to nonexistent publications. Multiple scholars whose names were listed in the report confirmed that they did not author papers that were attributed to them and collaborators. Also, studies could not be found in journals where they were allegedly published. In a White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reduced these errors to “formatting issues.”
In higher education, we call this academic misconduct. Even after the report was revised and reissued, NOTUS found additional errors, some of which were misinterpretations and misrepresentations of studies cited throughout.
When the HHS fake citations news broke, several students and colleagues posed the same question to me: “Can you believe they did this?” My response to each person was the same: “Yes.” Honestly, it surprises me that they were so surprised. It is not my intent to normalize academic dishonesty. But Kennedy has long been critiqued for peddling sketchy, pseudoscientific theories. For instance, in April he made several false claims and absurdly offensive comments about people with autism that garnered tremendous backlash from researchers, parents, advocates and autistic people. Thus, the inclusion of fake citations in a report emerging from the commission that Kennedy leads was not at all shocking to me.
Just ahead of the NOTUS exposé, Kennedy said, “We’re probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” The Washington Post reports.
There is insufficient evidence to corroborate his claims. In fact, peer review strengthens and protects the credibility of these and other journals. It seems that the MAHA movement has greater respect for fake studies than it has for actual peer-reviewed science published in legit venues like JAMA and the suite of other journals that the American Medical Association publishes. Policymaking based on made-up studies places the health of our nation at risk.
Beyond Kennedy’s track record and recent comments, the Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated its disregard for research and the scholars who produce it. The underrepresentation of experts in cabinet-level and other leadership roles, the cancellation of research grants, and the politicized attacks on research universities are just a few of numerous confirmatory indicators. Policymaking that weakens the research infrastructure of universities, where much of the best, most useful science in the world is produced, places the health of our nation at risk.
Imagine the creation of new drugs based on fake science that somehow meets the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. Six months ago, that would have been unthinkable. Now, it seems dangerously possible.
Imagine thriving university-based research labs, centers and institutes that were on the brink of lifesaving discoveries suddenly finding themselves in danger of having years of experiments ruined because of federal research funding reductions. Six months ago, that would have been unthinkable. Now, it is occurring at a dangerously high number of research universities.
It is not unthinkable that people who make up citations probably would make up results and masquerade them as credible science. At most universities, Ph.D. students would be severely punished, perhaps even dismissed from their academic programs, for engaging in similar acts of academic misconduct. It is unexplainably wild that policymakers at the highest level in our nation’s government are not held to the same standard. Indeed, a much higher standard is what so-called gold-standard science requires.
The health of our nation’s children and adults is in the hands of policymakers whose academic misconduct gets excused as “formatting issues.” These dangerous times call for scientists to convince taxpayers to hold our government accountable for the protection of scientific seriousness, the commitment of public resources to credible scientific enterprises (including, but not limited to research universities) and the rejection of pseudoscientific recklessness that places people’s lives at risk.
