Digital Product Passports: Transforming America’s Linear Economy to Combat Waste, Counterfeits, and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

The U.S. economy is being held back by outdated, linear supply chains that waste valuable materials, expose businesses to counterfeits, and limit consumer choice. American companies lose billions each year to fraudulent goods—everything from fake pharmaceuticals to faulty electronics—while consumers are left in the dark about what they’re buying. At the same time, global disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic revealed just how fragile and opaque our supply chains really are, especially in critical industries. Without greater transparency and accountability, the U.S. economy will remain vulnerable to these risks, stifling growth and innovation while perpetuating inequities and environmental harm. 

A shift toward more circular, transparent systems would not only reduce waste and increase efficiency, but also unlock new business models, strengthen supply chain resilience, and give consumers better, more reliable information about the products they choose. Digital Product Passports (DPP) – standardized digital records that contain key information about a product’s origin, materials, lifecycle, and authenticity – are a key tool that will help the United States achieve these goals.

The administration should establish a comprehensive Digital Product Passport Initiative that creates the legal, technical, and organizational frameworks for businesses to implement decentralized digital passports for their products while ensuring consumer ownership rights, supply chain integrity, and international interoperability. This plan should consider which entities provide up-front investment until the benefits of a digital product passport (DPP) are manifested.

Challenge and Opportunity 

The United States faces an urgent sustainability challenge driven by its linear economic model, which prioritizes resource extraction, production, and disposal over reuse and recycling. This approach has led to severe environmental degradation, excessive waste generation, and unsustainable resource consumption, with marginalized communities—often communities of color and low-income areas—bearing the brunt of the damage. From toxic pollution to hazardous waste dumps, these populations are disproportionately affected, exacerbating environmental injustice. If this trajectory continues, the U.S. will not only fall short of its climate commitments but also deepen existing economic inequities. To achieve a sustainable future, the nation must transition to a more circular economy, where resources are responsibly managed, reused, and kept in circulation, rather than being discarded after a single use. 

At the same time, the U.S. is contending with widespread counterfeiting and fragile supply chains that threaten both economic security and public health. Counterfeit goods, from unsafe pharmaceuticals to faulty electronics, flood the market, endangering lives and undermining consumer confidence, while costing the economy billions in lost revenue. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep weaknesses in global supply chains, particularly in critical sectors like healthcare and technology, leading to shortages that disproportionately affected vulnerable populations. These opaque and fragmented supply chains allow counterfeit goods to flourish and make it difficult to track and verify the authenticity of products, leaving businesses and consumers at risk. 

Achieving true sustainability in the United States requires a shift to item circularity, where products and materials are kept in use for as long as possible through repair, reuse, and recycling. This model not only minimizes waste but also reduces the demand for virgin resources, alleviating the environmental pressures created by the current linear economy. Item circularity helps to close the loop, ensuring that products at the end of their life cycles re-enter the economy rather than ending up in landfills. It also promotes responsible production and consumption by making it easier to track and manage the flow of materials, extending the lifespan of products, and minimizing environmental harm. By embracing circularity, industries can cut down on resource extraction, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate the disproportionate impact of pollution on marginalized communities.

One of the most powerful tools to facilitate this transition is the digital product passport (DPP). A DPP is a digital record that provides detailed information about a product’s entire life cycle, including its origin, materials, production process, and end-of-life options like recycling or refurbishment. With this information easily accessible, consumers, businesses, and regulators can make informed decisions about the use, maintenance, and eventual disposal of products. DPPs enable seamless tracking of products through supply chains, making it easier to repair, refurbish, or recycle items. This ensures that valuable materials are recovered and reused, contributing to a circular economy. Additionally, DPPs empower consumers by offering transparency into the sustainability and authenticity of products, encouraging responsible purchasing, and fostering trust in both the products and the companies behind them.

In addition to promoting circularity, digital product passports (DPPs) are a powerful solution for combating counterfeits and ensuring supply chain integrity. In 2016, counterfeits and pirated products represented $509B and 3.3% of world trade. By assigning each product a unique digital identifier, a DPP enables transparent and verifiable tracking of goods at every stage of the supply chain, from raw materials to final sale. This transparency makes it nearly impossible for counterfeit products to infiltrate the market, as every legitimate product can be traced back to its original manufacturer with a clear, tamper-proof digital record. In industries where counterfeiting poses serious safety and financial risks—such as pharmaceuticals, electronics, and luxury goods—DPPs provide a critical layer of protection, ensuring consumers receive authentic products and helping companies safeguard their brands from fraud.

Moreover, DPPs offer real-time insights into supply chain operations, identifying vulnerabilities or disruptions more quickly. This allows businesses to respond to issues such as production delays, supplier failures, or the introduction of fraudulent goods before they cause widespread damage. With greater visibility into where products are sourced, produced, and transported, companies can better manage their supply chains, ensuring that products meet regulatory standards and maintaining the integrity of goods as they move through the system. This level of traceability strengthens trust between businesses, consumers, and regulators, ultimately creating more resilient and secure supply chains.

Beyond sustainability and counterfeiting, digital product passports (DPPs) offer transformative potential in four additional key areas: 

Plan of Action

The administration should establish a comprehensive Digital Product Passport Initiative that creates the legal, technical, and organizational frameworks for businesses to implement decentralized digital passports for their products while ensuring consumer ownership rights, supply chain integrity, and international interoperability. This plan should consider which entities provide up-front investment until the benefits of DPP are realized.

Recommendation 1. Legal Framework Development (Lead: White House Office of Science and Technology Policy)

The foundation of any successful federal initiative must be a clear legal framework that establishes authority, defines roles, and ensures enforceability. The Office of Science and Technology Policy is uniquely positioned to lead this effort given its cross-cutting mandate to coordinate science and technology policy across federal agencies and its direct line to the Executive Office of the President. 

Recommendation 2. Product Category Definition & Standards Development (Lead: DOC/NIST)

The success of the DPP initiative depends on clear, technically sound standards that define which products require passports and what information they must contain. This effort must consider the industries and products that will benefit from DPPs, as goods of varying value will find different returns on the investment of DPPs. NIST, as the nation’s lead standards body with deep expertise in digital systems and measurement science, is the natural choice to lead this critical definitional work. 

    Recommendation 3. Consumer Rights & Privacy Framework (Lead: FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection)

    A decentralized DPP system must protect consumer privacy while ensuring consumers maintain control over the digital passports of products they own. The FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, with its statutory authority to protect consumer interests and experience in digital privacy issues, is best equipped to develop and enforce these critical consumer protections.

    Recommendation 4. DPP Architecture & Verification Framework (Lead: GSA Technology Transformation Services)

    A decentralized DPP system requires robust technical architecture that enables secure data storage, seamless transfers, and reliable verification across multiple private databases. GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, with its proven capability in building and maintaining federal digital infrastructure and its experience in implementing emerging technologies across government, is well-equipped to design and oversee this complex technical ecosystem.

    Recommendation 5. Industry Engagement & Compliance Program (Lead: DOC Office of Business Liaison)

    Successful implementation of DPPs requires active participation and buy-in from the private sector, as businesses will be responsible for creating and maintaining their product clouds. The DOC Office of Business Liaison, with its established relationships across industries and experience in facilitating public-private partnerships, is ideally suited to lead this engagement and ensure that implementation guidelines meet both government requirements and business needs.

    Recommendation 6. Supply Chain Verification System (Lead: Customs and Border Protection)

    Digital Product Passports must integrate seamlessly with existing import/export processes to effectively combat counterfeiting and ensure supply chain integrity. Customs and Border Protection, with its existing authority over imports and expertise in supply chain security, is uniquely positioned to incorporate DPP verification into its existing systems and risk assessment frameworks.

    Recommendation 7. Sustainability Metrics Integration (Lead: EPA Office of Pollution Prevention)

    For DPPs to meaningfully advance sustainability goals, they must capture standardized, verifiable environmental impact data throughout product lifecycles. The EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention brings decades of expertise in environmental assessment and verification protocols, making it the ideal leader for developing and overseeing these critical sustainability metrics.

      Recommendation 8. International Coordination (Lead: State Department Bureau of Economic Affairs)

      The global nature of supply chains requires that U.S. DPPs be compatible with similar initiatives worldwide, particularly the EU’s DPP system. The State Department’s Bureau of Economic Affairs, with its diplomatic expertise and experience in international trade negotiations, is best positioned to ensure U.S. DPP standards align with global frameworks while protecting U.S. interests.

      Recommendation 9. Small Business Support Program (Lead: Small Business Administration)

      The technical and financial demands of implementing DPPs could disproportionately burden small businesses, potentially creating market barriers. The Small Business Administration, with its mandate to support small business success and experience in providing technical assistance and grants, is the natural choice to lead efforts ensuring small businesses can effectively participate in the DPP system.

      Conclusion

      Digital Product Passports represent a transformative opportunity to address two critical challenges facing the United States: the unsustainable waste of our linear economy and the vulnerability of our supply chains to counterfeiting and disruption. Through a comprehensive nine-step implementation plan led by key federal agencies, the administration can establish the frameworks necessary for businesses to create and maintain digital passports for their products while ensuring consumer rights and international compatibility. This initiative will not only advance environmental justice and sustainability goals by enabling product circularity, but will also strengthen supply chain integrity and security, positioning the United States as a leader in the digital transformation of global commerce.

      Improving Research Transparency and Efficiency through Mandatory Publication of Study Results

      Scientists are incentivized to produce positive results that journals want to publish, improving the chances of receiving more funding and the likelihood of being hired or promoted. This hypercompetitive system encourages questionable research practices and limits disclosure of all research results. Conversely, the results of many funded research studies never see the light of day, and having no written description of failed research leads to systemic waste, as others go down the same wrong path. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should mandate that all grants must lead to at least one of two outputs: 1) publication in a journal that accepts null results (e.g., Public Library of Science (PLOS) One, PeerJ, and F1000Research), or 2) public disclosure of the hypothesis, methodology, and results to the funding agency. Linking grants to results creates a more complete picture of what has been tried in any given field of research, improving transparency and reducing duplication of effort. 

      Challenge and Opportunity

      There is ample evidence that null results are rarely published. Mandated publication would ensure all federal grants have outputs, whether hypotheses were supported or not, reducing repetition of ideas in future grant applications. More transparent scientific literature would expedite new breakthroughs and reduce wasted effort, money, and time across all scientific fields. Mandating that all recipients of federal research grants publish results would create transparency about what exactly is being done with public dollars and what the results of all studies were. It would also enable learning about which hypotheses/research programs are succeeding and which are not, as well as the clinical and pre-clinical study designs that are producing positive versus null findings. 

      Better knowledge of research results could be applied to myriad funding and research contexts. For example, an application for a grant could state that, in a previous grant, an experiment was not conducted because previous experiments did not support it, or alternatively, the experiment was conducted but it produced a null result. In both scenarios, the outcome should be reported, either in a publication in PubMed or as a disclosure to federal science funding agencies. In another context, an experiment might be funded across multiple labs, but only the labs that obtain positive results end up publishing. Mandatory publication would enable an understanding of how robust the result is across different laboratory contexts and nuances in study design, and also why the result was positive in some contexts and null in others. 

      Pressure to produce novel and statistically significant results often leads to questionable research practices, such as not reporting null results (a form of publication bias), p-hacking (a statistical practice where researchers manipulate analytical or experimental procedures to find significant results that support their hypothesis, even if the results are not meaningful), hypothesizing after results are known (HARKing), outcome switching (changes to outcome measures), and many others. The replication and reproducibility crisis in science presents a major challenge for the scientific community—questionable results undermine public trust in science and create tremendous waste as the scientific community slowly course-corrects for results that ultimately prove unreliable. Studies have shown that a substantial portion of published research findings cannot be replicated, raising concerns about the validity of the scientific evidence base. 

      In preclinical research, one survey of 454 animal researchers estimated that 50% of animal experiments are not published, and that one of the most important causes of non-publication was a lack of statistical significance (“negative” findings). The prevalence of these issues in preclinical research undoubtedly plays a role in poor translation to the clinic as well as duplicative efforts. In clinical trials, a recent study found that 19.2% of cancer phase 3 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) had primary end point changes (i.e., outcome switching), and 70.3% of these did not report the changes in their resulting manuscripts. These changes had a statistically significant relationship with trial positivity, indicating that they may have been carried out to present positive results. Other work examining RCTs more broadly found one-third with clear inconsistencies between registered and published primary outcomes. Beyond outcome switching, many trials include “false” data. Among 526 trials submitted to the journal Anaesthesia from February 2017 to March 2020, 73 (14%) had false data, including “the duplication of figures, tables and other data from published work; the duplication of data in the rows and columns of spreadsheets; impossible values; and incorrect calculations.”

      Mandatory publication for all grants would help change the incentives that drive the behavior in these examples by fundamentally altering the research and publication processes. At the conclusion of a study that obtained null results, this scientific knowledge would be publicly available to scientists, the public, and funders. All grant funding would have outputs. Scientists could not then repeatedly apply for grants based on failed previous experiments, and they would be less likely to receive funding for research projects that have already been tried, and failed, by others. The cumulative, self-correcting nature of science cannot be fully realized without transparency around what worked and what did not work.

      Adopting mandatory publication of results from federally funded grants would also position the U.S. as a global leader in research integrity, matching international initiatives such as the UK Reproducibility Network and European Open Science Cloud, which promote similar reforms. By embracing mandatory publication, the U.S. will enhance its own research enterprise and set a standard for other nations to follow.

      Plan of Action

      Recommendation 1. The White House should issue a directive to federal research funding agencies that mandates public disclosure of research results from all federal grants, including null results, unless they reveal intellectual property or trade secrets. To ensure lasting reform to America’s research enterprise , Congress could pass a law requiring such disclosures.

      Recommendation 2. The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) should develop guidelines for agencies to implement mandatory reporting. Successful implementation requires that researchers are well-informed and equipped to navigate this process. NSTC should coordinate with agencies to establish common guidelines for all agencies to reduce confusion and establish a uniform policy. In addition, agencies should create and disseminate detailed guidance documents that outline best practice for studies reporting null results, including step-by-step instructions on how to prepare and submit null studies to journals (and their differing guidelines) or federal databases.

      Conclusion

      Most published research is not replicated because the research system incentivizes the publication of novel, positive results. There is a tremendous amount of research that is not published due to null results, representing an enormous amount of wasted effort, money, and time, and compromised progress and transparency of our scientific institutions. OSTP should mandate the publication of null results through existing agency authority and funding, and Congress should consider legislation to ensure its longevity.

      This memo produced as part of the Federation of American Scientists and Good Science Project sprint. Find more ideas at Good Science Project x FAS

      Frequently Asked Questions
      Are studies with null results interesting?

      It is well understood that most scientific findings cannot be taken at face value until they are replicated or reproduced. To make science more trustworthy, transparent, and replicable, we must change incentives to only publish positive results. Publication of null results will accelerate advancement of science.

      Isn’t science always going to have waste?

      Scientific discovery is often unplanned and serendipitous, but it is abundantly clear that we can reduce the amount of waste it currently generates. By mandating outputs for all grants, we expedite a cumulative record of research, where the results of all studies are known, and we can see why experiments might be valid in one context but not another to assess the robustness of findings in different experimental contexts and labs.

      Is this system necessary given that many scientific studies are exploratory?

      While many agencies prioritize hypothesis-driven research, even exploratory research will produce an output, and these outputs should be publicly available, either as an article or by public disclosure.

      What about computational or AI studies that are often not hypothesis-driven?

      Studies that produce null results can still easily share data and code, to be evaluated post-publication by the community to see if code can be refactored, refined, and improved.

      What other actions would improve replicability?

      The “Cadillac” version of mandatory publication would be the registered reports model, where a study has its methodology peer reviewed before data are collected (Stage 1 Review). Authors are given in-principle acceptance, whereby, as long as the scientist follows the agreed-upon methodology, their study is guaranteed publication regardless of the results. When a study is completed, it is peer reviewed again (Stage 2 Review) simply to confirm the agreed-upon methodology was followed. In the absence of this registered reports model, we should at least mandate transparent publication via journals that publish null results, or via public federal disclosure.