False positives, flawed stats, misused data: Reform group warns science (and liberty) under attack
By Daniel Nuccio - Northern Illinois University
The College Fix | August 29, 2025
Key Takeaways
- A new report highlights a lack of accountability in scientific research, with claims that government funding may incentivize biased research to support preferred narratives.
- Public health agencies are criticized for their expanding roles and misuse of statistics, creating unnecessary regulations that infringe on personal freedoms—termed by some as 'Wizards of Regulatory Science.'
- Proposed reforms include stricter laws on research integrity, improved science education, and safeguards to protect individual liberties from government overreach in scientific regulation.
Flaws, bias, and incentivized research in scientific studies are leading to shoddy findings and government regulations that restrict liberty, according to a new report from the National Association of Scholars, an organization focused on higher education reform.
“There are entire fields which have been affecting scientific regulation that sure seem, politely, bunkum,” NAS Director of Research David Randall said in a recent webinar discussing the report.
The online event marked the release of the most recent report in the association’s “Shifting Sands Series” project, described as examining “how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation.”
America lacks meaningful mechanisms for investigating or punishing researcher malfeasance, said Stan Young, director of the project, during the Aug. 19 webinar.
“There are no cops for science,” he said. “There are no laws. There are no prosecutors, no courts, no judges to police a bad system in the university.”
Warren Kindzierski, an adjunct professor of environmental health at the University of Alberta School of Public Health, highlighted what he and Young referred to as “The University Science Problem.”
“Too many of these studies coming from researchers at universities have false results,” said Kindzierski during the webinar.
He went on to note examples from nutrition science, environmental epidemiology, and the social sciences of influential studies that are frequently cited despite poor replication records.
Young also noted how, when findings within a larger body of research are ambiguous, it can be difficult to discern whether such ambiguity is downstream of corruption or incompetence.
‘Wizards of Regulatory Science’
Making matters worse, the government may actively exacerbate existing problems by incentivizing biased research, Young said.
“Why is there so much junk science?” Young asked rhetorically. “Well, one thought is that the government buys research supporting the narrative that they want to push.”
“Government funding doesn’t always, but it can quite easily support self-serving claims,” he said.
“The naive belief is that research generates claims, [which] generates government action, but it can reverse,” he added. “The government can have a point of view and they can fund research that supports that point of view.”
Richard Williams, board chair of the Center for Truth in Science, discussed the expansion of public health and the “misuse of statistics” by those in the field to generate “false positives that are used to supply proof that government intervention is needed to resolve issues.”
Recounting the history of public health during the event, Williams described how over the centuries public health’s goals shifted from stopping the spread of contagious disease to preventing contagious disease to getting rat droppings and dangerous chemicals out of food to going “nuts into all sorts of areas.”
Williams said public health agencies now concern themselves with not just infectious disease and food safety, but also diet, healthcare, education, bullying, poverty, prison reform, transportation, and broadband internet access among numerous other areas.
Regardless of whether some goals might be a net-positive to individuals or society, Williams said, many of them are unrelated to public health. But, he added, treating them as if they were allows public health bureaucrats to accumulate power, and in effect, greater control over people’s lives.
Describing them as the “Wizards of Regulatory Science,” Williams said what public health bureaucrats do is “gin up a lot of often phantom risks,” present a solution that is assumed to work, and never follow up to determine what effect their efforts had.
Eroding liberty
Similarly, Randall said, “we have, as a nation, ceded a remarkable amount of power to people acting on the basis of science.”
Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, cited President Dwight Eisenhower’s “famous warning against the accumulation of power, whether deliberate or not, by a military-industrial complex.”
“But he also was very worried about how government funding for scientific research…would corrupt the academy and also undermine democratic accountability,” Lewis said during the event.
As an example of the real-world implications of this, Randall noted how during COVID “we had one of the worst…destructions of liberty in the country.”
While the general public is willing to forgive and forget on the condition that those responsible refrain from repeating past mistakes, he said, “every professional is saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that again the next time we can.’”
Finding solutions
As for what can be done moving forward, Randall said there are four major areas in which he and his colleagues believe reforms must be made.
First, he said, there needs to be statutes or laws to address questionable research practices by scientists. For example, he said, these could entail requiring researchers to replicate their findings, as well as implement certain statistical procedures that reduce the risk of false positives.
In education, Randall said, K-12 science education standards need to be tougher, teacher education needs to be improved, and the requirements of science majors and graduate students at universities need to be more rigorous.
“We need every person who graduates from high school to be able to say, ‘Wait a minute. I heard that you can muck around with statistics to jimmy up a fake result. When I hear that there’s something I should be panicking and pulling my hair out about, maybe I should just take a look to see if there’s anything in this newspaper article about whether they did the proper due diligence to make sure it’s not just some gummed up, jimmied up fake report,’” Randall said.
Additionally, Randall said, “science reform includes the protection of liberty,” which he said includes not just holding commissions and setting policies to prevent the kinds of abuses of power that occurred during COVID, but also looking at how AI and social media companies may inhibit free speech.
Lastly, he said, policy institutes interacting with government officials need to convey that even though politicians and administrations may have limited political capital and other worthy goals, the basics of science policy reform matter too.
The full webinar can be viewed here.
Post a Comment