OSTP Issues Guidance for Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science

By: Yvette Seger
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
On June 23, Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), issued a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies regarding implementation of the Executive Order on “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”

Most of the memorandum outlines the nine key tenets of Gold Standard Science (GSS) and the related agency responsibilities for each. These tenets define GSS as:

• Reproducible;
• Transparent;
• Communicative of error and uncertainty;
• Collaborative and interdisciplinary;
• Skeptical of its findings and assumptions;
• Structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;
• Subject to unbiased peer review;
• Accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and
• Without conflicts of interest.

Agencies are directed to report plans for implementing GSS to OSTP within 60 days (August 22), with annual reports due by September 1 each subsequent year. Plans must include descriptions of how the agency is addressing each tenet via policy and budget principles, development of standardized evaluation metrics to assess adherence to tenets and impact on scientific quality, development and provision of training resources for agency personnel, and descriptions of how technology will be leveraged and any challenges faced during implementation.