The Baselines Are the Target

On Sunday, President Trump ordered federal suspension and debarment officials to investigate the contractors who produced the Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence, the guide federal judges have used for three decades to evaluate expert testimony. The order called the manual's climate science content a fraud and directed procurement officials to take action against those responsible ^[1]. The mechanism is the point: a reference work judges consult to determine what scientific evidence is reliable is being treated as a contractor compliance problem, policed through the levers of federal procurement.

Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. — Donald Trump

The Federal Judicial Center had already withdrawn the manual's climate change chapter in February after 27 Republican state attorneys general challenged its impartiality ^[1]. The executive order now targets what remains. This is not regulatory rollback. The administration has already been reducing the government's regulatory capacity at multiple levels: rules, legal foundations, enforcement personnel, and investigative institutions. This beat has documented that pattern. What is now visible across at least seven domains is something different: actions that share a form distinct from removing constraints on conduct. They target the reference materials that courts, scientists, historians, and citizens rely on as neutral ground for judgment. They replace the baselines others depend on rather than removing the rules that constrain action. Consider the EPA. In May, Administrator Lee Zeldin repealed the 2009 endangerment finding that identified greenhouse gases as a threat to public health. This was not the undoing of a specific emissions rule. It was the elimination of the scientific determination that any future climate regulation would need to cite as its foundation. Legal observers noted that a Supreme Court ruling in the administration's favor could permanently prevent any future EPA administration from regulating carbon emissions ^[2]. The same form appears in the national parks. Under the "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order, the Interior Department removed at least 51 exhibits across 37 park sites, including climate change signage at Acadia and slavery exhibit panels at the President's House in Philadelphia ^[3]. The order framed the removals as correcting a narrative where the nation's legacy of advancing liberty is "reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed" ^[4]. The parks are not being deregulated. What the public encounters as history at federal sites is being changed. In February, CIA Director John Ratcliffe ordered the retraction or revision of 19 intelligence reports produced during the Obama and Biden administrations, citing political bias. The retracted analyses covered topics from LGBTQ+ rights in the Middle East to women in white supremacist extremism. Senator Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee's vice chair, warned the move threatened the credibility and independence of the intelligence community itself ^[5].

The President's Intelligence Advisory Board plays an important advisory role, but it is not a substitute for the independent analytic judgment of the CIA and the broader Intelligence Community. — Mark Warner

In April, Trump dismissed all 22 members of the National Science Board via email. The board, established by statute in 1950, provides independent oversight of the National Science Foundation. Representative Zoe Lofgren noted it was destroyed because it advises the president on the future of NSF and stood in opposition to a proposed 55 percent budget cut ^[6]. In May, the Office of Personnel Management proposed a government-wide nondisclosure agreement for all federal employees. The ACLU warned it would leave the public in the dark about how government works. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called it another attempt to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees ^[7]. Each action operates on a different register: procurement, regulation, curation, classification, personnel, employment. But the form is consistent. None removes a rule governing what someone may do. Each changes the information, the record, or the institutional knowledge that someone else relies on to make a judgment. Courts have pushed back. In May, Judge John Bates rejected the Justice Department's argument that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, calling it a stark misreading of precedent ^[8]. In June, Judge Catherine Kelley ordered the Interior Department to restore the removed park exhibits by July 4, describing the removals as an attempt to rewrite history ^[9].

Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood that Defendants’ efforts, ostensibly taken in the name of restoring dignity, instead seek to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen. — Angel Kelley

But the pushback has not held. The First Circuit reversed Judge Kelley's order on July 2, allowing the exhibit removals to stand ^[4]. And the Justice Department's constitutional challenge to the Presidential Records Act itself remains pending. The administration is not merely defending its actions within the law. It is arguing that the law protecting the record should not exist. The DOJ's position is that Congress has no authority to preserve presidential records for the sake of posterity ^[8].

It exceeds any preservation power because Congress cannot preserve presidential records merely for the sake of posterity — United States Department of Justice

That is the pattern's sharpest edge. If the baselines are the target, the laws protecting the baselines are the obstacle. The question the appellate courts will now answer is whether those laws survive.