The National Academy of Advocacy

A growing climate scandal at the US National Academy of Sciences

Sep 01, 2026

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) — a storied institution signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 under an act of Congress — finds itself at the center of growing controversy over how it has mixed climate change science and politics in violation of its Congressional mandate and the organization’s commitment to objectivity, independence, and excellence.

It would be easy to simply dismiss the issues here as just another arena where pathological partisan politics has taken root — science institutions have certainly not been immune. While it is certainly true that universities and many institutions of expertise have become increasingly politicized and political targets of the current administration, partisan battles are not all that is going on.

There is a real scandal unfolding at the NASEM.

Today’s post explains a new element to the growing scandal, why it matters, and recommends that Congress amend the federal charter for the NASEM in the near term.

Let’s start with what the NASEM is and what it does. NASEM is a private, nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization operating under the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences (NAS).1

Congress mandates the NAS to mobilize the nation’s scientific and technical expertise in service of the public welfare. Its functions include:

stimulating and coordinating research; identifying important scientific, environmental, economic, health and national-security problems;
organizing research to address them;
connecting domestic and international researchers with the federal government;
reducing duplication while preserving individual initiative;
and collecting and disseminating scientific and technical information to government and the public.

The figure above displays how the NASEM describes its values . The organization exists to serve the national interest, improve public policy and public understanding, benefit the public welfare, and furnish scientific and technical advice to government and other organizations. The NASEM serves everyone.

The scandal is that the NASEM has been acting well beyond this mandate as a political advocate — trading on its authority and legitimacy to serve special interests, whether those are of its non-governmental funders, those charged with executing its projects, or its leaders.

In my book The Honest Broker — which gives this site its name — I explain that:

The Issue Advocate focuses on the implications of research for a particular agenda. . . Issue Advocates are found everywhere, and science is no exception. Whether the issue is a presidential election, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or the Kyoto Protocol, many scientists are willing to take sides in a contested political issue, and use their status as scientists, or invoke their specialized expertise, to argue for their cause.

I argue in the book that issue advocacy is fundamental to a healthy democracy, and draw a straight line to the importance of its functions as described by James Madison in Federalist 10. In general advocacy by scientists or organizations is not problematic at all — it is an important contribution to democracy.

However, the NASEM was establishing to serve a role other than as an issue advocate — by design and in practice. Consider how the institution characterizes its role with respect to advocacy:

“We will NOT undertake work that is inconsistent with scientific evidence, for which an evidence base is insufficient, or that appears to be advocacy or have a foregone conclusion. We will avoid projects that would require us to make value judgments or that would be viewed as advocacy for specific policy or social outcomes, and we will avoid sponsors that may be viewed as advocates for such outcomes. Partaking in such work would serve to undermine our credibility.”

The unfolding climate scandal is a scandal because the NASEM has undeniably and egregiously violated these principles.

After that long wind up, let’s jump straight to a smoking gun.

The image below was included in a letter sent on August 28 from Rep. James Comer (R -KY) — chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — to Neil Shubin, the president of the NAS. In the letter, Shubin’s predecessor as NAS president, Marcia McNutt (whose term ended June 30, 2026) is asking a donor to the NAS, Carol Cicerone, for permission to use the donated funds to prepare a NASEM report.

The report was to be submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in support of “federal investment in CO2 reduction” and to counter “a handful of climate deniers” whose work McNutt feared would lead to a rescission of EPA’s Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases.

The figure below, also from the Comer letter, comes from the NASEM unit that organized the climate report, and makes clear that the report was intended to influence EPA and the Department of Energy — the scientific community and the general public were “secondary audiences.”

In his letter Comer concludes:

“Read together, this evidence suggests NAS’ intent to salt the scientific battlefield against EPA’s proposed action for purposes of both litigation challenging any EPA rescission of the Endangerment Finding and other policy efforts aimed at undoing a rescission.”

There can be little doubt that Comer’s reading of this evidence is correct. The purpose of his letter was to request from NASEM further internal documentation associated with the climate report’s production that NASEM has thus far refused to provide — if that documentation offers an alternative explanation, why not provide it?

Let go beyond Comer’s letter.

The internal unit of NASEM that led the production of the climate report to be submitted to EPA is called Climate Crossroads which has a mission to harness

“the breadth of the National Academies’ expertise, resources, and advice to catalyze actions to meet the climate crisis.”

Climate Crossroads operates with an explicit advocacy orientation. Among its external funders is the Waverly Street Foundation which also funds the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, which is a focal point of climate litigation.

As chance has it, the NASEM selected two people affiliated with the Sabin Center to author the climate-science chapter in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. I earlier showed that the chapter’s authors work in support of climate litigation, with a plaintiffs’ attorney — and another Sabin center affiliate — apparently ghostwriting portions of that chapter.

Small world.

The advisory board of Climate Crossroads includes:

Peter Frumhoff, formerly chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists now at Harvard and who focuses his work on advancing climate litigation;
Carlton Waterhouse, a board member of the Environmental Law Institute, which operates the Climate Judiciary Project, accused of “attempts to influence the impartiality of judges” involved in climate litigation.
Cynthia Atherton, who until 2023 (while she joined the advisory board) was the Science Program Director at the Heising-Simons Foundation, which is among the funders of Columbia’s Sabin Center (discussed above) and a funder of the NASEM climate attribution committee (which is another part of this growing scandal).

As I said, small world.

Many other members of the advisory board make clear that the orientation is advocacy, far removed from the NASEM normal activities.

As the NASEM role in climate advocacy and its embedding into the philanthropic climate activism ecosystem have become exposed, public statements by NAS officials have shown the organization struggling to justify its activism.

In April 2025, on X several people pressed NAS president Marcia McNutt on why the Academies had never studied Covid-19’s origins, with the full exchange shown below.

McNutt explained that the NASEM could not perform a study of COVID origins because the government had not called on NASEM to perform such a study: “Y’all have it backwards,” she told them. The organization’s charter has the federal government calling on the Academies to conduct studies, “not the other way around.”

Four months later, NAS launched, financed, completed, and publicized its fast-track climate study to provide to EPA and no federal agency had requested that study. The climate report was initiated from within the NASEM and paid for with non-governmental funds.

McNutt’s letter to Cicerone also contradicts what NASEM says about itself. Testifying to the House Science Committee in 2019, McNutt stated:

“We do not advocate for specific policy positions.”

That is obviously not true.

Shirley Tilghman of Princeton, who chaired the committee that prepared the fast-track climate report, said the committee worked toward “the ultimate aim of informing the EPA, following its call for public comments.” The report describes the work as a response to “EPA’s request for public input.” At the September 2025 release of the report, committee members pointed to Clean Air Act language directing EPA to consider National Academies input, and said the money came from two NAS endowments “to ensure the independence of the project.”

The Cicerone Endowment holds outside money, given by Ralph and Carol Cicerone and apparently required donor approval for its particular use — hence McNutt’s request to Carol Cicerone in the letter I shared near the top of this post. That is the opposite of independence — funding was predicated on the specifics of the promised policy advocacy.

This is clear from Cicerone’s reply to McNutt, shown below, which approved the use of the funds for the fast-track report and shows that she clearly understood what the report would conclude: to advocate to EPA the continuing need for CO2 reduction and opposition to rescission of the Endangerment Finding.

A short aside: Speaking of small worlds, from 1988 to 1990 I was a student assistant — FORTRAN programming to manage satellite data on ozone chemistry — at NCAR in its Atmospheric Chemistry Division, which was led by Ralph Cicerone, husband of Carol Cicerone in the email exchanges above. Ralph later went on to serve as president of the NAS, prior to McNutt’s tenure. Ralph died a decade ago. I remember him as a fantastic scientist and a good person, who always had time for a student assistant with endless questions about ozone science and policy.

I searched for any another situation where NASEM may have convened a fast track study to provide input to a Federal Register notice related to any type of federal regulation. I could find nothing remotely analogous.

In July 2018 the presidents of NAS, NAE, and NAM filed a comment in EPA’s docket on transparency in regulatory science, warning that the rule would discard valid evidence and pointing the agency to Academies reports already published — but no new study was commissioned. In March 2020 state attorneys general and city attorneys asked NAS to review EPA’s supplemental proposal in that same docket, and I find no public record of a response.

The Academy does have a precedent of weighing in on climate science in highly political contexts — but it did so in response to government requests. On May 11, 2001, John Bridgeland, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, wrote to NAS President Bruce Alberts asking where climate science held the greatest certainties and uncertainties, and for an answer as soon as possible.

A committee chaired by Ralph Cicerone produced a report, Climate Change Science on June 6, 200, less than a month later telling the White House — which was then reviewing its stance on the Kyoto Protocol — that temperatures had risen and human activity likely drove most of the recent change.

Two days later, NAS convened a closed-door forum at Senator Larry Craig’s request with about ten climate researchers, three senators, and a cabinet member. I happened to be one of those ten researchers — small world! That forum was the event that prompted a leading climate scientist to contact me ahead of time and suggest that I downplay my work on the role of growth and development in explaining rising disaster losses, lest it take away from calls for emissions reductions. I wrote about it at the time — but I digress.

The turn to climate advocacy at NAS has occurred as NAS has come to rely more and more on non-federal funding, mostly philanthropic and from organizations with political aims. The figure below shows that from 2011 to 2023 the share of federal funding of NAS dropped from about 85% to under 60%.2

Government support peaked in 2011 at $277 million and fell to $201 million in 2023, before inflation. In response, the NAS has increasingly sought, and collected, other sources of funding.

That has led to mission creep: Climate Crossroads cultivates sponsors, raises money, and coordinates communications and congressional engagement. The NAS even has a pitch on its website inviting sponsors interested in shaping “policy agendas.”

In 2026 there is not much that distinguishes the storied National Academy of Sciences from the myriad partisan NGOs advocating for everything under the sun — like the Union of Concerned Scientists or The Heartland Institute. The NASEM has become just another 501 (c)(3) organization pushing an agenda.

Ironically, in the end, the NASEM fast-track climate report turned out to be irrelevant to EPA’s case for rescission of the Endangerment Finding in its final rule.

The DOE report that McNutt characterized as being written by “climate deniers” was released July 23, 2025.
EPA announced the proposed rescission of the Endangerment Finding July 29.
McNutt approached Carl Cicerone July 31.
Climate Crossroads sought internal approval August 7.
NAS published its fast track report September 17, days before comments closed.

That same day Judge William Young ruled that DOE had violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in how it prepared its report. The lawsuit was brought by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists — whose arguments were legally sound, in my view. DOE had no choice but to disband the group.

Then EPA dropped science altogether from its rescission. The final rule, issued February 12, 2026, rests on statutory interpretation and judicial precedent — and explicitly disclaims reliance on the DOE report, and calls the NAS submission and other NAS climate-science material “not pertinent.”

As I have argued, justifying the rescission of the Endangerment Finding on scientific claims would have been deeply flawed — if the NASEM fast-track study did contribute in some way to the elimination of scientific claims from the rescission rule, it just may have made the arguments more likely to survive judicial review.

There is a further irony here — NASEM may have also violated FACA with the fast-track committee: Whether FACA was violated depends on whether NASEM created it under an agreement with an agency. NASEM says it paid for the study from endowment funds and the motivation was internal.

But Comer's letter documents that the report was written with EPA and DOE as its primary audiences, and the records NASEM has withheld would reveal what, if any, contact NASEM had with those agencies related to the report. That is another possible reason that NASEM is refusing to release the documents requested by Comer.

In 2006, in my Conversations with Presidential Science Advisors series, I asked Frank Press — President Jimmy Carter’s science adviser and then NAS president from 1981 to 1993 — why the Academy never assessed Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

Press explained that a sign-on petition opposing SDI had included signatures from roughly sixty percent of Academy members, and he judged that the petition had compromised the Academy’s ability to provide an independent voice on the subject. He said that any NAS report, even one from a balanced committee, would be dismissed as compromised in the political process, because the institution had seemingly signaled its position already.

No independent assessment of SDI ever materialized. Frank Press gave up a study to protect the Academy’s credibility.

The National Academy of Sciences should function as a very special organization — one of the very few that can truly serve as an honest broker. Much reform is needed, but an important and straightforward first step would be for Congress to amend the Federal Charter for the NAS to prohibit funding from non-governmental organizations and require that all studies be requested by federal agencies or Congressional committees.

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