More than a dozen Republican attorneys general are demanding the Trump administration cut off federal funding to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, accusing the taxpayer-funded organization of producing a biased climate change manual designed to tilt the scales in multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against the energy industry.
The letter, addressed to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, was led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and signed by 22 states total. It targets a chapter in the “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition,” a guide used by federal judges to understand complex scientific topics in court cases.
States signing the letter include Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Knudsen said the chapter “was designed to influence judges in multi-billion-dollar climate cases, was funded by climate litigation funders, was written by academics with little relevant scientific expertise and documented financial and institutional ties to climate litigation advocacy, and was shaped by a climate plaintiffs’ attorney.”
The National Academies took in $84 million in Transportation Department contracts or grants in 2024, $33 million from the Pentagon, and $7 million from the Department of Energy. Knudsen is calling for the organization to be suspended or disbarred from all federal contracts and grants across the executive branch.
At the center of the dispute is the chapter’s funding and authorship. The project received money in part from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which donated to the Collective Action Fund, a group that contributed money to climate litigation firm Sher Edling. The attorneys general say this created a conflict of interest and violated the terms of an $875,000 National Science Foundation grant used to develop the manual.
The attorneys general note that when the manual was first being planned, the National Academies suggested it should be accessible to judges “more skeptical of climate science’s methods and conclusions,” while simultaneously categorizing scientists skeptical of climate change theories as “not credible.” No reviewers representing “materially different viewpoints on climate science” were included in the process, which the AGs say violated the terms of the NSF grant.
Last month, the Federal Judicial Center, which co-produced the manual, removed the climate chapter from its version after more than two dozen Republican attorneys general warned the chapter could improperly influence judicial decisions. The National Academies has not followed suit.
