Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on RealClear Science on August 19, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The irreproducibility crisis of modern science—the failure of large proportions of scientific research to produce true results—just keeps on going. In November, a survey of 1,924 biomedical researchers revealed that,
72% of participants agreed there was a reproducibility crisis in biomedicine, with 27% of participants indicating the crisis was ‘significant.’ The leading perceived cause of irreproducibility was a “pressure to publish” with 62% of participants indicating it “always” or “very often” contributes. … Just 16% of participants indicated their institution had established procedures to enhance the reproducibility of biomedical research.
In April, one headline blared, “Up to 42% of insect behavioral experiments not reproducible across laboratories.” Another headline touted “Huge reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies.” We’re two decades on from the publication of John Ioannidis’ seminal warning, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” and the scientific community isn’t anywhere close to solving the problem.
The federal government, thank heavens, is taking steps to fix the problem. The Trump administration’s executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science” directs each federal agency to improve reproducibility standards. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, both have indicated that they will champion reproducibility reforms. Already, they face pushback from scientists who say that the proposed federal reforms just aren’t the way to deal with the problem. Lots of scientists, politicized and progressive, simply oppose any reproducibility reform by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration is more than justified in the reforms it has undertaken so far. In fact, they should institute far more extensive reforms to ensure that federal science policy is founded exclusively on reproducible and transparent scientific research. State and local policymakers should work alongside federal science reformers, and so should policy institutes. Science policy reformers, including those working within the Trump administration, will find chapter and verse in the National Association of Scholars’s (NAS) False Positives: The Irresponsibility Crisis of Science Policy Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation on why even bolder reproducibility reform is necessary and urgent.
[RELATED: When Reproducibility Reformers Fail Their Own Test]
False Positives, the fifth of our Shifting Sands: Keeping Count of Government Science reports, synthesizes our four previous reports and catalogues policy recommendations for reproducibility reform. These four reports were PM2.5 Regulation (2021), Food Frequency Questionnaires (2022), Confounded Errors of Public Health Policy Response (2023), and Zombie Psychology, Implicit Bias Theory, and the Implicit Association Test (2024). These reports examined how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation by different federal, state, and local agencies:
- PM2.5 Regulation focused on the field of environmental epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) policies and regulations.
- Food Frequency Questionnaires focused on the field of nutritional epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) policies and regulations.
- Confounded Errors focused on the country’s public health bureaucrats’ grave mishandling of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This included lapses by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
- Zombie Psychology focused on the Implicit Bias theory and the Implicit Association Test, which have informed a broad range of federal, state, and local statutes and regulations.
Government policies should be built on transparent and accountable research. Regulations developed from this research are meant to clear a high barrier of proof. The regulations should be based on reproducible scientific research. All the Shifting Sands reports proceeded by applying a straightforward statistical examination of scientific studies used to justify government policies.
The Shifting Sands reports found strong evidence that the irreproducibility crisis had affected all these bodies of research. This, in turn, has led to an irresponsibility crisis of science policy in these agencies. In essence, the EPA, the FDA, the CDC, and a host of states and localities all have used irreproducible science to justify irresponsible science policy that imposes illiberal and economically burdensome regulations or statutes on the American people.
These failures are so widespread that they constitute a crisis of government, and not just a crisis of science. The irresponsibility crisis of science policy must be addressed by four reforms:
- Federal government agencies must make systematic changes to their regulatory and funding practices to remove the irreproducibility crisis from American science and the irresponsibility crisis from American government.
- Federal and state policymakers must make systematic changes to American K-12 and undergraduate science and math education to educate properly a new generation of American scientific professionals and informed citizens and policymakers.
- Federal and state policymakers must end the arbitrary procedures of scientific research and scientific governmental regulation to preserve our liberty from arbitrary government.
- Policy institutes must dedicate themselves to science policy, staff their institutes with personnel dedicated to science policy, and make science policy a priority.
[RELATED: Weaponized Science Needs a Reckoning—CEI Offers One]
Federal policymakers also should reform the structure of the American university, redesign the federal government’s indirect cost funding formulas for university research, prohibit discrimination in the guise of illiberal programs and policies such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and much more. But reproducibility reform is a first-order priority.
The Trump administration has begun to take up this challenge—and it should build upon what it already has done. Science and research procedures must be built on the solid rock of transparent, reproducible, and reproduced scientific inquiry, not on shifting sands. Likewise, science regulatory policy should be built on transparent and accountable procedures.
Americans must dedicate themselves to the proper government of science policy to ensure that they retain their freedom.
Follow David Randall on X and visit our Minding the Science column for in-depth analysis on topics ranging from wokeism in STEM, scientific ethics, and research funding to climate science, scientific organizations, and much more.
Image: “MainLobbyWallClinicalResearchCenterNIH” by Duane Lempke on Wikimedia Commons
