Trump Proposes Defunding National Academies

On Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social ordering officials to consider suspending or debarring the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine from federal funding, the latest in a string of criticism from Republican leaders targeting NASEM’s work on climate-related science.

Trump’s post came days after NASEM released a report on extreme event attribution science, a relatively new area of science that assesses the extent to which climate change influences an individual weather or climate event.

The committee that put together the report has experienced intense scrutiny, as have other areas of NASEM’s work related to climate science.

Republicans on the House Science Committee are pressing NASEM to provide information on the attribution committee that NASEM has said is confidential. They argued in a letter last week that oversight of NASEM is a matter of national security because NASEM is “one of the most trusted and respected providers” of science that agencies rely upon. They expressed interest in legislative reforms “with respect to the Academies as a whole.”

Trump’s Truth Social post took aim at the climate science chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, the main scientific resource for federal judges, which is co-authored by NASEM and the Federal Judicial Center. Separately, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee criticized NASEM last year for its decision to study whether current evidence supports the since-rescinded endangerment finding.

Trump’s post states that NASEM “has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats” and their “fraudulent, biased, and misleading” editions of the reference manual have created “huge losses” across the country in court cases on climate change.

House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) issued a statement last week saying climate skeptics, “MAGA Republicans,” and the president “have spent weeks building an opposition campaign against this very report because they feared what it would say.” She accused them of protecting “big polluters at the expense of their own constituents.”

NASEM did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s post or the letters from House Science Republicans.

The attribution science report

The report issued last Thursday updates NASEM’s findings from 2016 on attribution science and finds that tools, methods, and datasets used for attribution science have advanced considerably over the past decade.

The report also found that since 2016, “the use of attribution science has expanded dramatically” in policy, regulatory, and legal contexts, James Hurrell, the committee chair, said at the report release webinar last week. The report acknowledges that extreme event attribution is increasingly being considered in climate lawsuits and describes potentially relevant legal areas.

Accusations of conflicts of interest on the committee began as early as its first meeting in November 2024. In one case, NASEM appeared to respond to these outside concerns: one former committee member, the lead scientist for UCS’s science hub for climate litigation, was removed in January 2025 on the same day that an oil industry blog criticized her for saying attribution science “has a role to play in litigation.” In another case, a committee member resigned from the committee because she was afraid that conservative groups and the Trump administration would “go after” the panel, according to E&E News.

The scrutiny ramped up this year, with House Science Committee Chair Brian Babin (R-TX) leading a letter to NASEM in April suggesting that there were conflicts of interest on the committee and requesting documentation of NASEM’s policy on conflicts of interest, balance, and committee composition, and information on the establishment and member selection for the attribution committee.

The letter states that attribution committee members have “extensive involvement in climate accountability litigation—whether through judicial education programs, amicus briefs, or affiliations with organizations funding plaintiffs.” That involvement “calls into question” the members’ ability to meet NASEM’s standards for committees, including that members should be objective, open-minded, and demonstrate an appropriate range of perspectives on the relevant issues. The letter also says the committee has private sponsors that “are known for their progressive environmental leanings,” including the Bezos Earth Fund and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

The reference manual

The climate science chapter of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which Trump cited as evidence of NASEM’s bias in his Truth Social post, has been repeatedly targeted by other Republican leaders in recent months.

After 27 Republican attorneys general criticized the chapter in January, the Federal Judicial Center removed it from its online manual, while former National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt declined to remove the chapter from the NASEM website. Then, in May, 11 Republican lawmakers said the White House should investigate whether NASEM should be suspended or debarred from federal funding because the climate science chapter “violates Gold Standard Science,” criticizing the peer review process and the authors’ and funders’ conflicts of interest. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought signaled his interest soon after.

Last week, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-ME) questioned Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the forward for the latest edition of the reference manual, about the controversy over the chapter at a hearing last week. Kagan said she had not read the chapter and that the FJC had removed the chapter “because so many people did think that that chapter was slanted in a particular direction.”

Following the chapter’s removal, 16 Democratic lawmakers wrote to the FJC’s director requesting its reinstatement. Authors of the reference manual also disputed the chapter’s removal in an open letter in March, describing the peer review process as “extensive and rigorous.”