New York, NY; August 19, 2025—The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published the fifth and final report in the Shifting Sands: Keeping Count of Government Science project, False Positives: The Irresponsibility Crisis of Science Policy, which provides a policy-oriented conclusion to the report series.
“False Positives delivers practical solutions to the widespread failures that constitute a crisis of government, and not just a crisis of science,” said the report’s co-author, David Randall, NAS Director of Research. “We seek to swiftly redress the irreproducibility crisis plaguing American science and government to restore the scientific process and rebuild the trust lost by the American people.”
The four prior reports under the Shifting Sands project—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)—examined how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation by different federal, state, and local agencies.
These four reports focused respectively on environmental epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) policies and regulations; nutritional epidemiology, which informs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) policies and regulations; the country’s public health bureaucrats’ grave mishandling of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which included lapses by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and 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 aim to clear a high standard 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 affected all these bodies of research. This led in turn to an irresponsibility crisis of science policy. The EPA, the FDA, the CDC, and a host of states and localities all used irreproducible science to impose illiberal and economically burdensome regulations or statutes on the American people.
“The continuous corruption of science has produced an unprecedented threat to the liberty of Americans,” continued Randall. “Bad policy led by irreproducible policy and ideologically motivated scientists has stunted American economic growth, curtailed liberties, and further eroded trust in American institutions. To prevent this crisis of confidence, America’s policymakers must ensure that the science underlying public policy and court decisions relies upon the best available science.”
We thus conclude in False Positives that 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 a new generation of American scientific professionals, 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.
NAS urges America’s citizens, policymakers, and policy institutes to take up this challenge. Science and research procedures should 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 self-government.
The Shifting Sands series is authored by David Randall, Warren Kindzierski, and Stanley Young.
NAS is a network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. Membership in NAS is open to all who share a commitment to these broad principles. NAS publishes a journal and has state and regional affiliates. Visit NAS at www.nas.org.
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If you would like more information about this issue, please contact David Randall at randall@nas.org.
Photo by Beck & Stone
