Sponsors (139)
The bill strengthens protections, transparency, and dissemination rights for federal science—aiming to make policy more evidence-based and to protect researchers—but does so by adding oversight, reporting, and centralized approval requirements that impose costs, risk delays in releasing research, and could concentrate control in OSTP.
Federal scientists and agency researchers (including contractor researchers) gain explicit protection from political interference in scientific findings and (non-political) personnel actions, reducing risk of censorship or punishment for science-based conclusions.
Policymaking on public health, the environment, and national-security-related technical matters is more likely to be guided by scientific evidence, which should improve the effectiveness of related federal, state, and local policies.
Federal researchers can disseminate work more freely (conference presentations, peer-reviewed publication, and broader communication), improving timely public access to scientific findings.
Agencies and taxpayers will face meaningful administrative and compliance costs (developing policies, training, staffing Scientific Integrity Officers, reporting, and OSTP reviews) that divert resources from other work.
Requiring OSTP approval and centralized review of agency scientific-integrity policies risks concentrating control, creating bottlenecks, politicization, and delays in policy acceptance or updates.
Pre-dissemination technical review processes and uniform enforcement, if not tightly bounded, could delay time-sensitive release of research and slow public access to important findings.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Requires covered federal agencies to adopt OSTP‑approved scientific integrity policies prohibiting political interference and protecting researchers' ability to communicate findings.
Official title: To amend the America COMPETES Act to establish certain scientific integrity policies for Federal agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee scientific research, and for other purposes.
Introduced February 6, 2025 by Paul Tonko · Last progress February 6, 2025
Requires covered federal civilian agencies that conduct, fund, or oversee research to adopt and enforce written scientific integrity policies approved by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The policies must prohibit political interference, suppression or alteration of scientific findings, and retaliation, and must protect the right of agency scientists, contractors, and grantees to communicate results and participate in the scientific community. Establishes deadlines for agency heads to submit policies for OSTP approval, allows agencies to keep existing policies only after an agency head makes a written determination and obtains OSTP approval, and adds detailed required prohibitions, permitted activities, whistleblower protections, peer‑review expectations, and procedures for pre‑dissemination technical review consistent with the policy framework.