A coalition of more than two dozen state attorneys general is asking the Trump administration and Congress to suspend federal grants to a national science organization for its ongoing left-wing climate activism.
In a Thursday letter to several Trump cabinet secretaries and congressional committees, the 25 Republican AGs raised concerns about recent actions by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The academies — which receive taxpayer-funded federal grants —have sought to advance leftist policies in recent years, as the Capital Research Center reported.
One avenue of activism highlighted by the state AGs is the NASEM’s role in the controversial fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which the nonprofit produced alongside the taxpayer-funded Federal Judicial Center (FJC). While designed to provide objective guidance to federal judges on science-related matters before the bench, the manual was found to contain a “Reference Guide on Climate Science” stacked with references and citations to left-wing climate activists and advocates.
The FJC retracted the controversial chapter following widespread backlash in February. The NASEM, however, continued to post the guide on its website until earlier this month, when it announced that the climate section would be temporarily removed while its team conducts an “independent review” of the “process used to produce the chapter.”
The organization’s announcement came weeks after President Trump ordered federal suspension and debarment officials to “review” the matter. The Federalist reported extensively on the left-wing activists and academics involved in the contested manual’s creation in the months leading up to the president’s directive.
In addressing Trump’s cabinet secretaries and the congressional committees, the Republican state AGs wrote that the NASEM’s review of the climate guide “appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM’s secrecy around all aspects of the review process.” They further argued that a “truly independent review would appoint an external panel; use reviewers who are not activists, litigation participants, or NASEM employees; publish the review process and findings; identify the review’s scope; and ensure the review’s scope addresses the material criticisms of the Chapter.”
“Critics have demonstrated that the Chapter materially misquotes the [United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual’s statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants,” the letter reads. “NASEM’s destruction of its own credibility in the Chapter and its response to criticism, combined with NASEM doubling down on propping up climate plaintiffs’ litigation theories by issuing another biased report (as discussed below), warrant debarment or suspension by federal agencies.”
The attorneys general went on to criticize a July NASEM report titled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026.”
They alleged that this “biased” report was “funded, led,” and received input from “climate-litigation supporters,” and that it was released to assist left-wing litigants in an upcoming Supreme Court case (Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County) involving a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies. They further contended that the NASEM “tim[ed]” the report’s release so that Suncor and Co.’s opponents could cite it in their SCOTUS briefs and Suncor supporters couldn’t since their “filing deadline had passed.”
“Notably, one amicus organization supporting plaintiffs in Suncor bragged about the Report’s timing, cited the Report over and over on ten of its pages, and received $100 million to ‘accelerate climate action’ from the Bezos Earth Fund — which also funded NASEM’s Report. Agencies may wish to look further into the nature of this convenient coincidence,” the letter reads.
The state AGs argued that taxpayer funds should not be bankrolling NASEM’s “biased actions,” which they said “warrant suspension or debarment.” They further urged Congress to find a different entity “for objective analysis” and consider axing an existing charter designating “the Academies as an adviser to the federal government.”
Suncor v. Boulder will be argued before the Supreme Court on Oct. 5.
