HELENA – Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen today led a coalition of 25 state attorneys general in urging Trump Administration officials to investigate and cancel federal grants to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for using taxpayer dollars to create radical, biased reports to influence climate cases in court.
In a letter sent today to seven of President Trump’s cabinet officials, Attorney General Knudsen outlined his concerns with NASEM using taxpayer money to produce a misleading climate change report to improperly influence ongoing climate related litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The report entitled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026” was created by NASEM for its allies to present to the court as a reliable and expert source. However, the report contains falsehoods and opinions that rely on research by climate activists who have recently been involved in political and climate change advocacy and litigation, rather than scientific and proven facts. NASEM has also been criticized by Attorney General Knudsen and President Trump for using taxpayer dollars to create biased training for judges.
“The National Academies seem dead set on using taxpayer dollars to push their radical climate agenda and influence court decisions, but not on my watch. My office flagged their fraudulent behavior back in February and gave them the chance to make things right, but instead they doubled down and created yet another biased document to force their ideology on Americans,” Attorney General Knudsen said. “President Trump has made it clear he takes this issue seriously, so I am hopeful the federal government will immediately halt the National Academies’ grant funding. Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for this activist work.”
The report supports dangerous and biased climate activist theories that argue fossil fuel companies should be held liable for climate change and losses sustained because of extreme weather events. Coincidentally, the report was released ahead of the amicus briefs supporting the climate plaintiffs, which were due earlier this month, which gave “plaintiffs’ supporters exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed it, to further their litigation goals, without affording the other side an opportunity to weigh in,” ahead of the pending SCOTUS case in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. Notably, one amicus organization supporting plaintiffs in Suncor bragged about the report’s timing, cited it on ten of its pages, and received $100 million to “accelerate climate action” from the Bezos Earth Fund.
“Reinforcing its intended use in litigation, the report states that attribution science ‘may be relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events,’ may be ‘useful in estimating marginal damages attributable to climate change,’ and may inform ‘responsibility or liability determinations,’ including ‘whether defendants may be held liable’ in climate litigation,” Attorney General Knudsen wrote.
This is not the first time NASEM has been under fire for using taxpayer dollars to produce biased climate science material to influence legal decisions. In February, Attorney General Knudsen sent a letter to the President of NASEM Marcia McNutt and the President-elect Neil Shubin, asking the organization to remove its biased climate science chapter used by federal judges from all publications, but they refused. Following Attorney General Knudsen’s letter, President Trump also criticized NASEM and ordered Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review the manual. NASEM temporarily removed the climate chapter from its publications for “independent review” five months after scrutiny and later released the climate report in July.
Attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming also joined the letter co-led with Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
