Guest, “Heck yeah I voted for this and it’s better than I expected” by David Middleton
National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing
Plan for slashed units and mission to be presented at governor’s meeting next week
- 2 Jun 2025 4:50 PM ET By Meredith Wadman
Last Saturday, the morning after a news article announced major job losses coming at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt wrote an apologetic memo to employees. Her statement to STAT that 250 people could lose their positions by summer’s end had come as news to the roughly 1100 NASEM staff. McNutt told staff “no decisions [have been] made” about the number of coming layoffs.
But there’s no doubt that the 162-year-old honorary society, which produces influential reports by committees of independent experts, is headed for dramatic changes.
[…]
The National Academy of Sciences was granted a charter by Congress in 1863 to provide the government with independent, objective advice on science and technology. Its flagship studies have addressed scores of subjects from research priorities for Alzheimer’s disease treatment to shaping the next decade of solar and space physics research. Because the organization does not have congressional funding, it must raise its own money for the studies. Philanthropies fund some, but most are supported by federal agencies. NRC received $200 million in government contracts and grants in 2023, the most recent year for which the number is available. And many of those contracts have been axed by the team of cost cutters at Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
[…]
The DOGE website lists 36 of the canceled NASEM contracts, and Science calculated the total cost of these losses to be more than $25 million. The list includes a $970,000 contract from the Department of Homeland Security to fund statistical research for a new office of homeland security statistics, a $250,000 contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a June workshop on preventing H5N1 bird flu transmission among farm workers and veterinarians, and a $500,000 study on drought and climate change funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
[…]
OK… The National Academies of Science is not funded by Congress taxpayers. However, they largely depend on government contracts, funded by Congress taxpayers, to fund the organization. Since taking office, President Trump and the DOGE team have been taking a chainsaw to government contracts (a campaign promise made to taxpayers)… Therefore the National Academies of Science are on the brink of extinction… Did I get that right? Presumably, the examples of cancelled government contracts listed above are critically important, at least critically important to the National Academies.
- “$970,000 contract from the Department of Homeland Security to fund statistical research for a new office of homeland security statistics”
- “$250,000 contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a June workshop”
- “$500,000 study on drought and climate change funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration”
They couldn’t list any useful or meaningful contracts?
“NRC received $200 million in government contracts and grants in 2023, the most recent year for which the number is available”
That same year, the NRC received $274 million in grants from philanthropic organizations, and exited the year with an endowment of nearly $700 million.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Report of the Treasurer: For the Year Ended December 31, 2023. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/27783.
Why should they receive any taxpayer funding?
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Makes no sense?: “Because the organization does not have congressional funding, it must raise its own money for the studies. Philanthropies fund some, but most are supported by federal agencies.”
How does one simultaneously “not have congressional funding” and do work “supported by federal agencies”? For both parts of that statement to be true, US congress would have to have told someone else to manage US spending.
Shell games…
“For both parts of that statement to be true, US congress would have to have told someone else to manage US spending.”
Congress did tell the Executive Branch bureaucrats to manage U.S. spending.
It’s just like at USAID. Congress didn’t authorize every single expenditure of the USAID organization. Instead, Congress gives USAID money and allows the USAID bureaucrats to decide what it is spent on.
The same thing goes with NOAA and NASA and other federal bureaucracies and it is the bureaucrats in those organizations that decide to send money to the National Academy of Sciences and others.
Congress didn’t authorize every single expenditure
Congress authorizes the budget overall, the department decides how to spend it, right? (I’m guessing they submit a general budget with categories of spending)
Is there any provision requiring that the money MUST be spent?
The provision is that if it isn’t spent, next year’s allocation may be smaller by at least that amount.
There’s a lot to be critical of NASEM over but this isn’t one of them. It’s not hard to unwrap, specifically, unlike say the EPA, NASEM gets no DIRECT funding from Congress, e.g. it’s operations are not in the budget. But when the EPA says “We need to spend $50M on a study of how humans are causing the destruction of the planet”…lo-and-behold members of NASEM are tagged for performing the study and thus get the $50M from the EPA…which of course is ‘government/taxpayer funding’.
But as the article notes NASEM has $700M in a bank account (effectively), they can fund whatever studies they think are important, or sell their services to private entities, and of course its not like the federal government stopped ALL scientific studies…so NASEM is in no risk of disappearing any time soon…its all just performance art to claim otherwise.
Being a political shill has consequences if your favored party loses.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia
Needs to go
Great news as they have a huge climate alarmism effort cutting across all three academies producing a constant flow of scary climate crap including reports, webinars and videos.
https://www.nationalacademies.org/topics/climate
It’s called SCIENCE. You know, the course that Science Deniers failed in six grade
Please point to some science on the linked page. NASEM does not do science,they do groupthink in small groups.
I am so glad you wrote that. As I passed three university-level semesters of physics, I must not be a science denier, whatever that is.
Science?? WB has been asked many, many times to show some actual “science”
And is still sitting on ZERO !!
There are many climate realists on this forum that have FAR more science background than he would ever be capable of.
He has been totally unable to say what is “denied” that he can provide any real scientific support for.
Anybody that uses the science in that context doesn’t understand science. Feel free to demonstrate that I am wrong in your specific case.
You mean the science deniers who think every tiny little change in climate or weather is a catastrophe, and caused by humans? Totally agree with you.
Tell us about science. What do you think it is?
We, the skeptics and pragmatists do not deny science.
We acknowledge that the planet’s climate has changed repeatedly over the eons.
We acknowledge that the energy transfers in the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere are dynamic, coupled, and chaotic.
We embrace that Gaia is much more clever than we who descended from monkeys.
We are offended by the blatant hubris that humans can control the weather.
We deny the science is settled.
We deny consensus is science.
We deny climate and climate change, both statistical constructs, can affect weather.
We deny models are data and the projections are valid predictions.
We deny modelling molecular interactions on a 25 km grid is a valid or meaningful.
We deny models that assert CO2 as an input to get temperature as an output, is a valid approach.
We deny manipulating data is scientifically valid.
We deny hindcasting is model validation. It is simply curve fitting.
We deny the validity of hijacking and redefining words is a good means of communication. Positive feedback, trapping heat, thermalizing electromagnetic radiation are all bogus in the current climate apocalypse vocabulary.
We deny the sun is constant. We deny the earth’s orbit is circular. We deny the planet is a perfect sphere. We deny the incident solar energy is constant everywhere. Pure and simple geometry demonstrates this.
We deny the CO2 is the “control knob” for the weather.
We deny that destroying western civilization and reducing the population to under a few hundred thousand is necessary to safe the planet.
We deny the planet needs extreme measures to protect it.
We watch with glowing alarm as the climate syndicate gets richer and richer and the rest of us suffer. We view with distain the elitist position of good for thee but not for me.
I am a mere statistician, scientifically trained in mathematics and statistics. I have observed a considerable amount of dodgy mathematics and statistics in a significant number of scientific papers in climate science in recent years and I can only dream of being one tenth as good as McIntyre and McKitrick. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest mathematical and statistical illiteracy is widespread among so called climate scientists.
Because those taxpayer rubes don’t know how to spend their money as smartly as we do.
Why can’t they just accept this ffs?
Running a National Academy can get really frustrating at times.
Joe understood us like nobody else ever managed to.
And there’s a reason for that . . .
The academies were taken over by content-free bureaucrats long ago, they are out of control by serious working scientists as they found when they tried to stop the climate alarm nonsense in one of the academies.
Like the big publicity units in the universities they just want to get headlines in the press about impending breakthroughs to boost the flow of money.
Sounds like the National Academies are just welfare for over-educated people who are otherwise unemployable. Useless people producing useless reports.
The National Academies produce dangerous, harmful, inaccurate Human-caused Climate Change reports that cause extreme damage to society.
The National Academies present Climate Change speculation and assumptions as established facts. Doing so constitutes Science Fraud.
Taxpayers should not be paying the National Academies money to spread Human-caused Climate Change Fraud.
The Human-caused Climate Change narrative has compromised the integrity of those leading the National Academies. Any competent scientist can see that the climate science is not settled, but these leaders tell us it is, without any evidence, just speculation and assumptions. Not science. It’s a bastardization of science caused by self-interest, or ignorance.
Private industry funds research in the hope that a useful product will pay for all the failed experiments. (Did Edison get taxpayer dollars?) A researcher who, over time, never produces anything of value? Why would he still get paid?
Throw in taxpayer dollars as the main or only source of income, nothing useful or beneficial needs to be produced. Only us taxpayers have anything to lose.
In 2018, The National Academies published, “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,” alleging that female academics faced a culture of systemic sexual harassment in STEM departments.
I’ve spent a lifetime in academic STEM, and by direct experience have seen the respect with which female academics are generally treated. But maybe elsewhere, things were bad. I was skeptical of the claim, so I studied the Report to see if I had ab error of perception.
That study might have been the worst piece of scholarship I have ever encountered. And, given a focus on pseudo-climatology, that’s really saying something.
After detailed critical appraisal. I was able to publish “Falsification of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire: No Evidence of Systemic Sexual Harassment in Academic STEM” in 2022. The run-around I got from Psychology journal editors was very familiar to me as a published AGW critic.
The 2022 paper not only revealed garbage scholarship from the NAS, but also overturned the entire 40-years-standing survey mode of sexual harassment studies. The short of it is, their conclusions are encoded in their assumptions. That failing will be familiar to WUWT readers.
The NAS has been political at least since Ralph Cicerone. IMO, it’s only gotten worse under Marcia McNutt.
I am a female and a mathematician/statistician. I have worked on Audit and Risk Committees in science organisations. I have been involved in robust arguments and disagreements. I have NEVER been treated as anything other than a colleague and my career spans 50 yrs now. I have also never considered that disagreement with a position I am arguing is anti-female or sexist. If I am right, I am right. If I am wrong, I am wrong. Nothing sexist in that, purely about competence. I LOATHE the way the current generation of vicious and nasty feminists (feminasties) use disagreements with their position as an argument that they are being treated badly. To misquote Forrest Gump, feminasty is as feminasty does!
Title IX was introduced in 1972 to make the bias against women in academia illegal. It was not unusual for a woman to be fired if she married a colleague (not the other way round!)
If they aren’t happy with the cuts suggested cut all government funding and see if they might indeed prefer the suggested cuts.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are dismantling and scrapping the Democratic Party’s kickback machine; one appropriation, one grant, and one subsidy at a time.
It’s 99% Trump. Republicans wouldn’t have the balls to do it on their own.
There are some Republican (in name only) that are fighting hard against Trump’s dismantling of the Democrat graft system….
… most of them have been, or are still, receiving some of that graft.
And some who seem to be particularly clueless, because they say they are going to vote down the BBB because it doesn’t go far enough !
Effing A Bubba!
It is the real effect of Doge, getting rid of thousands of useless sycophants. The level of funding of corruption is ludicrous, and needs to be stopped.
Can you say “porkbarrel”? I knew you could.
In times of fiscal crisis, as the U.S. currently is enjoying, things that are not useful for survival must be discarded. It the product you make is not critical, then funding it is no longer justified. Lack of climate research is not a problem. With a multitude of computer models, none of which are useful, some must be jettisoned in order to right the ship.
Tough luck, but riding the gravy train to nowhere is a luxury we can no longer afford to pay for.
I worked for a while in a technical government organization as a contractor.
We called the government workers, govies for short but privately referred to them as White Collar Welfare.
I did all of the work for my govy so he could go to meetings across the country.
I had a chat with the boss (head of the department). He confided in me that a person’s position and status was determined by (a) the number of direct reports and (b) the funding level. He also informed me in no uncertain terms that spending the funding was what counted and that you did not need to get anything for that money. It just needed to be spent.
A funny thing, too. While in the home office I went through more than a dozen year’s worth of power point presentations of technical challenges and issues. Of the top 20 identified in the earliest report, only 1 had been resolved and that resolution was due to my group. The other 19 had no progress at all. The other interesting observation was the one noted improvement was the effective use of color in the presentations. My guess is that happened due to contractors being responsible for creating the power point slides.
You can argue on one point or another to your heart’s delight, but you will never convince me that ALL government work is necessary or even effective. There are places like the Copyright and Patent offices that do good work. There are others, too. There is just too much that is simply white collar welfare.
Bureaucrats exist in all large organizations, private and government. Their primary purpose is to grow the organization.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01668-x
“Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ has prompted an outcry: here’s why”
One is “structured for falsifiability of hypotheses’
While this sounds reasonable I am not sure how this always works. Pure and Applied Science operate similarly, often overlapping as in medicine but should be recognizable as such. What has happened in the last few decades is a ‘certification’ of publish or perish, easier application of statistical approaches, extreme increases in real and imaginary ‘subdisciplines,’ among other problems. These have been suggested as examples. “ National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, National Board for Education Sciences (NBES), the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).”
One of the obvious ‘cures’ I read was “political statements should not be included in a peer reviewed paper.” Policy is an application being pushed by some ‘scientific’ organizations that should know better. I once encountered “Anecdotal” science for observational which is always necessary regardless of the machinery used. It was long ago suggested that environmental manipulations using structures was a way to provide hypothesis testing which would satisfy “scientific requirements.” [Weinstein, M. P. 1982. Commentary: A need for more experimental work in estuarine fisheries ecology. Northeast Gulf Science. 5(2):59-64.] Journal is out of business and this hasn’t worked so well as realized.
Another I recently encountered was Chamberlin’s caution about “Ruling Theories,” in his “Multiple Working Hypotheses.” Geological example of salt dome drilling, this wasn’t required? – “Azoulay, P., et al. 2019. Does science advance one funeral at a time? American Economic Review. 109: 2889–2920. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161574” Haven’t read it about their “star scientists” but while it may be that geriatric thought is more likely to produce such stubborness, it’s certainly not limited to that age group. Regardless, we need to be careful about the “fixes” such as some have used the pejorative “lack of citations” not realizing how long it took some ideas to be recognized, whether found either “ falsifiable,” good or not. While helpful, this doesn’t demand statistical results.
They couldn’t list any useful or meaningful contracts?”
That’s why I don’t like political articles like this one, I would consider preventing H5N1 bird flu being contracted by veterinarians and farm workers “useful” and “meaningful” but the author deliberately omitted that!
Money laundering takes many forms……..