SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
scientific integrity
Rebalancing Checks and Balances: How to Curb Executive Abuse
President Trump has conclusively demonstrated that the executive branch cannot be trusted to police itself in following the law. Congress must act to prevent future overreach.
Apr 25, 2025
In his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has moved aggressively to expand the authority of the executive branch, thereby upending our traditional system of checks and balances among the three branches of government. Reforming this system while he still holds office will be impossible, but he will eventually move on, and Congress should be planning now for changes to the system of shared governance to limit outsize executive authority and prevent future autocratic abuses.
Although President Trump has pushed the envelope further than most could have imagined possible, his abuse of power is reminiscent of the Nixon administration. After the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon, Congress took steps, such as the Anti-Impoundment Act, to curb presidential excesses. Following the second Trump administration, an even more fundamental restructuring may be in order.
One thrust of Trump’s second term has been a concerted effort to sideline the legal referees charged with checking abuses. Nearly a score of inspectors generals charged with addressing fraud and abuse have been summarily dismissed without cause. The Office of Government Ethics has been decapitated. The head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel charged with enforcement of civil service laws, such as whistleblower protection, has been removed.
America did not intend to elect a dictator.
The net result is that violations of laws and ethics go unchecked because independent oversight has been neutralized. To prevent the recurrence of future lawless regimes, Congress should reinstitute some of the checks Mr. Trump has shredded but in a way that insulates them from unilateral executive reversal. Congress needs to strengthen the institutional guardrails against executive violations of ethical standards and for protection of federal employees from illegal actions and enforceable standards for scientific integrity.
One step would be a statute relocating inspectors general (IGs) within the legislative branch. IGs do not perform an inherently executive function as they lack authority to implement their recommendations. Congress should appoint fixed-term IGs and team them with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), another legislative body, to keep this strengthened watchdog function beyond executive obstruction.
In this restructuring, the independent IGs could also conduct scientific integrity reviews to resolve challenges to the accuracy of scientific and technical agency information. This would put control of scientific and technical data and analyses beyond the unilateral control of the very bureaucracies responsible for creating them and thereby prevent them from peddling disinformation. Moreover, uniform procedures would facilitate the use of expert scientists from other agencies, universities, and other institutions to serve as review panels.
Similarly, institutions charged with enforcing civil service protections, such as the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics, should be moved into the legislative branch, as well, to prevent them from executive nullification.
Most fundamentally, the executive should not be able to control the judges who decide on disputes the executive branch has with its employees, contractors, and others. Basic fairness requires that these referees be impartial and not under the direct control of one party in the disagreement.
These referee positions are also not inherently executive in nature. For example, under the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, Congress designated its GAO to serve as an independent and impartial forum for the resolution of disputes concerning the awards of federal contracts. Similarly, investigations into and reviews of employment abuses and related disputes could be handled by statutorily relocated Offices of Special Counsel and Government Ethics.
Significantly, one of the more insidious recent Trump initiatives is asserting his authority to summarily remove administrative law judges (ALJs) who preside over hearings regarding administrative or legal disputes between federal agencies and affected parties. The prospect of removal at will undoubtedly pressures ALJs to alter their decisions to favor the executive agencies.
Mr. Trump is also attempting (once again) to sideline the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the civil service court which hears legal disputes about the illegal termination or treatment of federal employees. During his first term, President Trump shuttered MSPB by refusing to appoint any persons to fill MSPB vacancies. The three-member MSPB soon lost a quorum to decided cases and entered the Biden administration with a backlog of undecided appeals of more than 3,700 cases.
In his current term, Trump is trying the same approach, seeking to remove one of the two remaining MSPB members midway in her five-year term. As a result, the MSPB has once again been shuttered and may not reopen for years,
To enforce the basic rule of law, Congress should move the cadres of administrative law judges and the MSPB to the judicial branch so that the basic fairness of these decision-makers is safeguarded and they are shielded from further executive interference.
While President Trump may claim that he is implementing the will of the public, a recent Wall Street Journal poll found broad bipartisan support for limiting Trump’s unilateral executive authority. America did not intend to elect a dictator.
Yet, the principal takeaway from events of the past few months is that President Trump has conclusively demonstrated that the executive branch cannot be trusted to police itself in following the law. To prevent future presidents from assuming the same authoritarian posture as Trump, Congress must act decisively to fundamentally rebalance our system of checks and balances.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden’s Imploding Scientific Integrity Initiative
It is difficult to see what about this administration's policy would prevent a return to the reign of “alternative facts” should Trump be reelected.
Oct 06, 2023
Following the tumultuous Trump years when scientific fact and fiction often clashed, President Joe Biden resolved to strengthen federal protections against suppression or alteration of government science. Just days after his inauguration, he issued an all-agency directive to bolster the scientific integrity policies that had proven so useless in stemming the abuses of Trump and his appointees.
This effort was launched under the hopeful banner of “Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity.” Now, months behind schedule, the first revamped scientific integrity policy crafted under this initiative is rolling out. Unfortunately, it leaves a lot to be desired.
If finalized, this revised policy would cover thousands of scientists and technical analysts working within the behemoth $1.7 trillion Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), which spans a dozen divisions and includes nine separate public health agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and Food & Drug Administration.
It will also likely serve as the template for new policies that are supposed to be adopted in all other federal agencies doing scientific work. Distressingly, among other shortcomings, this draft policy:
- Fails to prevent political interference with no provision for independent investigation of allegations of misconduct or sanctions for meddling by political appointees;
- Lacks any meaningful legal protections for scientists doing controversial work that may conflict with an agency’s political agenda;
- Contains few safeguards against scientific work being altered or suppressed, such as defined clearance procedures for approving technical publications or presentations;
- Does not apply to grantees and, in agencies such as the NIH, much of the scientific work is done under grants; and
- Does not allow public scrutiny of conflict of interest waivers granted to industry members of federal advisory committees, allowing these key scientific bodies to be stacked with little outside scrutiny. First Biden Scientific Integrity Policy Falls Well Short (peer.org)
Under this proposed policy, every aspect of enforcing scientific integrity principles would remain a captive of the political process inside the agencies. Thus, it is difficult to see what about this policy would prevent a return to the reign of “alternative facts” should Trump be reelected. Moreover, in the unlikely event that it did prove restrictive, a reelected Trump could simply rescind it, just as he did so many other Obama-era policies.
One core problem was the White House “framework” for this policy, issued earlier this year. Ths framework was composed largely by the same agency scientific integrity officers who presided over the Obama-era policies which had proven so ineffectual under Trump.
As a result, the organizing principle behind both the HHS draft and the White House framework appears to be bureaucratic self-protection. That explains the lack of transparency pervasive throughout the draft HHS policy which, tellingly, stipulates that “all descriptions of investigations and appeals will be anonymized.”
How is public trust in the credibility of government science supposed to be enhanced by closed-door investigations overseen by officials named by political appointees and reported to the public only in “anonymized” versions?
Perhaps one reason for these disappointing results is that it was overseen by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. Before the work had barely begun, the OSTP Director was forced to resign for bullying his staff. That left the reins for this project of an OSTP Deputy Director who last year was sanctioned by the National Academy of Sciences for misconduct and barred from participating in its publications and activities for five years.
Consequently, agencies were allowed to write scientific integrity rules in the most self-serving fashion possible. This, in turn, means that agencies will invoke scientific integrity principles only when it is politically convenient—an arrangement that defeats the entire purpose of this elaborate scientific integrity policy formulation effort.
Preventing this unfolding implosion propelled by institutional self-interest will require that the Biden brain trust radically change course. Rather than pursuing this murky agency-by-agency approach, the White House should impose government-wide rules that would:
- Create uniform interagency review and appeal processes for scientific misconduct allegations, such that individual agencies can no longer control investigations and sequester the results.
- Set uniform penalties for scientific integrity violations and require that political appointees found responsible for violations be publicly identified.
- Establish uniform clearance policies so that scientific material cannot be withheld from publication for other than technical reasons with enforceable appeal procedures to prevent research papers from being held in extended limbo.
There is no plausible reason why scientists in different agencies should be treated differently or have different rights. These government-wide rules would not only drive significant change but would also surmount the bureaucratic strategies where ground-breaking science is often strangled. Further, it may encourage Congress to codify these safeguards so that they may not be wiped summarily wiped out by a succeeding president.
Simply put, restoring trust in government science requires the ability of the public to verify that its trust is merited.
Keep ReadingShow Less
White House Censorship in the Name of Scientific Integrity
There is good reason to fear that a new Biden administration policy will create a broad chilling effect on scientific work involving hot button topics, such as birth control, climate change, and fetal tissue research. We must do better.
Sep 27, 2023
Laurance J. Peter, author of the “Peter Principle” that theorized in any hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence, once remarked that “Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” This ingrained institutional resistance to change often induces bureaucracies to seek to suppress facts that challenge underlying assumptions of the current political agenda.
So, it was distressing to see the Biden White House issue a “Model Scientific Integrity Policy” earlier this year containing a provision that would forbid any federal from scientist “making or publishing” any statements “that could be construed as being judgments of, or recommendations on,” any federal policy without permission. It was doubly ironic that this new prohibition is contained in the section that purports to promote transparency and the “free flow of scientific information.”
This provision was based upon a similar bar contained within the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s scientific integrity policy adopted in 2014. USDA’s is the only federal scientific integrity policy with such a prohibition.
USDA has used this provision mainly to assuage concerns expressed by agrochemical companies and other “stakeholders.” In this regard, this provision has been invoked to order a staff entomologist to remove his name from a peer-reviewed journal article on how monoculture farming reduces diversity in insect populations, thus limiting beneficial pollinators. That same provision was also cited as the basis for barring a scientist from speaking at a conference about the effects on pollinators from genetically modified crops and the insecticides used to treat them. That scientist later resigned in frustration after concluding that groundbreaking research would be impossible to pursue inside USDA.
Unfortunately, the early indications are that with White House support, other agencies will adopt this gag order in their scientific integrity policies. This summer, the Department of Health & Human Services proposed to add this prohibition in its policy. It is now in its final stage of approval, meaning that it may soon apply across the entire $1.7 trillion HHS, its 12 divisions, and nine separate public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health, and Food & Drug Administration. Altogether, these agencies have roughly 78,000 employees, most of whom perform scientific or technical work that would be covered by the new policy.
There is good reason to fear that this new policy will create a broad chilling effect on scientific work involving hot button topics, such as birth control, climate change, and fetal tissue research. For example, a far more limited Congressional ban on the use of research funds “to advocate or promote gun control” caused the CDC to cease all gun violence research for more than 20 years until that legislative language, called the Dickey Amendment, was finally narrowed in 2019. Applying a broad prohibition on anything that “could be construed as” a comment or recommendation on any federal policy in all research at HHS would be tantamount to putting the Dickey Amendment on steroids.
It is especially galling that a ban on discussing the implications of research is part of a scientific integrity policy.
The further irony is that the Biden directive driving the revision of all federal scientific integrity policies was motivated by the censorship and suppression of science that occurred during the Trump years, during which the current scientific integrity policies inaugurated under President Obama proved useless. It does not take much imagination to envision how this Biden-sponsored language could be weaponized during a DeSantis or second Trump presidency.
Rather than serving any explicit political agenda from the White House or HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, this provision appears to be the product of mid-level bureaucrats seeking to maintain some control of the clearance process for research publications. Under the guise of scientific integrity, the bureaucratic need to control information appears to have prevailed in the construction of a new generation of federal policies.
It is especially galling that a ban on discussing the implications of research is part of a scientific integrity policy. Scientific research with policy implications is often most at risk of suppression or political manipulation – and thus in greater need of protection rather than condemnation.
Nonetheless, this prohibition on statements that could be perceived as a comment or recommendation on any federal policy may spread across a score of agencies that are now in the process of revising their scientific integrity policies. It is easily foreseeable that this provision could be used to punish scientists or stifle research deemed controversial, such as –
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research showing that toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” or other pollutants are penetrating our food chain due to inadequate regulatory or enforcement policies;
- Research showing that dangerous viruses and other pathogens are at risk of release from U.S. Geological Survey wildlife research laboratories due to the absence of independent biosafety reviews; or
- Studies showing that water quality degradation and desertification are increasing across Western rangelands due to overgrazing on Bureau of Land Management livestock allotments.
On top of everything else, such a prohibition is patently unconstitutional as applied to government scientists speaking or writing as private citizens, since the public interest in the issue would almost always outweigh any potential disruption of efficient government operations.
Even if expressing these views is legally protected, government scientists should not need to cast a profile in courage to discuss the implications of their research openly. Federal bureaucracies do not need more opportunities to quash controversial findings or dissenting views. The Biden White House should pull the plug on this ill-considered restriction.Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular