The oil industry and its allies gained a major supporter in their yearslong effort to derail climate science programs at the National Academies: the president of the United States.
It had the immediate effect of escalating the risk facing the institution over its work aimed at educating federal judges about the science behind climate change.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, President Donald Trump ordered his administration to open a so-called suspension and debarment investigation into the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine for what he called a “fraudulent, biased, and misleading” publication on climate change.
Suspension and debarment is a proceeding that agencies can use to ban universities, research institutions and other entities from federal contracts in order to protect the government’s interests. Suspensions prevent entities from receiving federal funds while debarment proceedings take place. If an entity is debarred, it’s excluded from doing business with the government for a period of time, generally up to three years.
Trump’s order is the latest development in a series of Republican attacks on the National Academies over its work on climate change. The institution in December assisted the Federal Judicial Center — the education arm of the federal judiciary — in preparing a chapter on climate science for an education manual used by judges. The center yanked the chapter in February from the so-called Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence following complaints from Republican attorneys general who said it was biased against the fossil fuel industry. The manual also included new guidelines on eyewitness identification, computer science and artificial intelligence. The National Academies declined to remove the climate chapter from its website.
It’s unclear which agencies would oversee the investigation, or what justification they might use to suspend support for the National Academies, which holds contracts with a variety of agencies that each have their own suspension and debarment office.
The Truth Social post simply directed “federal suspension and debarment officials” to review the matter. Neither the White House nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to requests for details.
A spokesperson said the National Academies “remain committed to our mission to provide independent, objective scientific advice,” adding that “those enduring values remain our commitment.”
It wasn’t clear if Trump was also taking action against the Federal Judicial Center for its role with the academies in writing the climate chapter for the manual. The center, which is chaired by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, gets its funding from Congress. A coalition of Republican attorneys general in February asked House and Senate lawmakers to investigate — and potentially defund — the education and research arm of the judiciary.
Suspension and debarment has become “more prevalent during the Trump administration,” according to the law firm, Holland & Knight, which said in a blog post that federal contractors “face few threats more serious than suspension or debarment.” Other targets during Trump’s second term have included Harvard University and federal contractors involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Science advocates say the latest threat marks a new opening in the Trump administration’s wave of actions against U.S. researchers.
“This science transcends ideologies and political affiliations, and is backed by decades of robust data, deep research and analysis,” Janice Lachance, director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest Earth science society, said of the National Academies’ work. “This is science that protects and preserves lives and livelihoods. Calls for suspension or debarment from federal funding for this crucial information is dangerous and misguided.”
Trump’s post follows a letter sent to the administration in May by a group of House Republicans, who said the climate science chapter in the manual violated “Gold Standard Science” by not including a “fully independent, meaningful peer review from scientists with differing views on climate science.”
The letter, led by Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison, asked White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to investigate whether the academies should be “suspended or debarred from all federal funding.”
Burlison said Monday that the administration appears to be “taking steps to protect taxpayers from funding political activism.”
“When government-funded institutions blur the line between research and advocacy, it undermines trust and demands accountability,” he added.
Trump’s social media post came days after the National Academies released an anticipated report on extreme weather attribution science, a field of research that examines the links between climate change and disasters such as hurricanes, heat waves and floods. Legal experts say it could bolster lawsuits seeking climate-related damages from the fossil fuel industry.
The oil and gas industry sought to discredit the report before it was released, and the House Science, Space and Technologies Committee threatened the National Academies with a subpoena shortly after it was published, accusing the academies of withholding information that the committee had requested as part of its ongoing oversight of the institution’s federally funded activities.
The attacks on the 173-year-old National Academies, established in 1863 to advise lawmakers on science and technology, comes as the administration also seeks to exert political control over federal scientific grant making and research institutions.
The White House proposed a major overhaul of its federal grant making system in May in a move that has prompted widespread alarm from scientists and other advocates. The draft rule from the Office of Management and Budget would dramatically increase White House control over billions of dollars in federal funding issued to universities, nonprofits, local governments and other grant recipients across the country.
The Trump administration in April dismissed every member of the National Science Board, the National Science Foundation’s top advisory committee, sparking outrage from scientists and members of Congress. The White House cited a little-known Supreme Court case to justify the move, while some experts have suggested that the authority to eliminate the NSB resides solely with Congress. House Democrats condemned the move as a “disaster for our scientific excellence.”
The White House has also threatened to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an NSF-funded institution and one of the nation’s top climate researcher centers. The nonprofit that manages NCAR sued the Trump administration in March, referring to its plans as a “campaign of retaliation” against the state of Colorado.
The latest move against the National Academies represents an “escalation on the scientific and legal communities and a desperate attempt to erase the reality that man-made climate change is impacting the daily lives of all Americans,” said Chris Marchesano, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. “Ultimately, the administration’s efforts to censor scientific consensus will not only fail, but be viewed as a shameful chapter in this nation’s history.”
Efforts to discredit the climate science chapter have emerged as part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to scuttle nearly two dozen climate lawsuits that are seeking billions of dollars in damages from the fossil fuel industry. One of the most high profile cases was started by Multnomah County, Oregon, after 69 people died during a heat wave in 2021. The county is asking the industry for $51 billion for infrastructure upgrades and damages.
Republicans have asserted that the authors of the manual’s climate chapter, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, who are affiliated with climate studies programs at Columbia University, had “applauded litigation as a tool to advance their preferred political objectives.”
Wentz and Horton have refuted that characterization. Democratic attorneys general and members of Congress have called on the Federal Judicial Center to restore the climate chapter, saying “partisan actors should have no input into the substantive determination of what constitutes accurate and reliable information.”
Democrats say the peer-reviewed chapter drew from a variety of expert climate sources and provided context to help courts assess the “credibility, weight, and admissibility of those different sources.”
