Defund The NAS!

June 07, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Here’s an article you might find interesting from Science magazine on June 2. The headline is “National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing.”

Science magazine is one of those formerly-prestigious “peer-reviewed” journals where for many decades you just had to get your research published in order to become someone in a scientific field. Somewhere along the way, Science turned from scientific inquiry to orthodoxy enforcement. The National Academy of Sciences (“NAS,” and along with two fellow Academies of Engineering and Medicine sometimes called “NASEM”), meanwhile, is a federally-chartered but supposedly private entity set up to give “independent” scientific advice to the government. The Academies raise meaningful amounts of private funds, but in the most recent reported year (2023) got the substantial majority of their funding (over $200 million) via contracts from the feds. (See Treasurer’s Statement here.). As far as I can determine, the main business of the National Academies, and particularly of the NAS, is also orthodoxy enforcement.

The latest, from the June 2 Science article, is that the National Academy of Sciences “is navigating a tense situation as the organization faces unprecedented contract losses and layoffs.” The President of the NAS is named Marcia McNutt. The Science piece describes a May 21 email sent by McNutt to colleagues outlining how the Academies (and their umbrella organization the National Research Council) plan to respond to funding cuts. Excerpt:

“While it is too early to share specific outcomes, we anticipate that the NRC will emerge as a smaller organization with fewer units,” McNutt wrote in a 21 May email.

How big are the funding cuts?

From Trump’s inauguration to 6 May, NRC lost 41 U.S. government contracts and received another eight stop-work orders. . . . 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.

Well, so far by my calculation that’s $25 million down and $175 million to go.

Is there anything about the NAS that’s worth preserving at all? To answer that question, you need to consider its long-time President, Marcia McNutt. Ms. McNutt transitioned from editor-in-chief of Science magazine over to President of the NAS way back in late 2015/early 2016. At that time I wrote two posts on that subject, here on December 18, 2015, and here on February 8, 2016. The focus of those two posts was what I called the “epidemic” of orthodoxy enforcement in the U.S. scientific establishment. And I identified the leader of that epidemic as Ms. McNutt.

In the December 2015 post I featured an extraordinary email submitted by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars opposing Ms. McNutt’s candidacy for President of NAS (although there was no other serious contender for the position at the time). Mr. Wood identified three major areas of scientific inquiry, all with huge money at stake, where Ms. McNutt as editor of Science had led the forces seeking to suppress all dissenting evidence and data. The three areas were (1) the so-called “linear no threshold” hypothesis as to the effects of pollutants and carcinogens (including radiation); (2) the health effects of very small particulate matter (2.5 microns or smaller) in the air (known as “PM 2.5”); and (3) the so-called “consensus model” of climate change driven by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I will repeat here a long excerpt from Mr. Wood’s email that I included in that 2015 post:

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge.  The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.  Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . .  Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing. . . .

1.  The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation.  The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.  This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers.  These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary.  In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it.  However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence.  Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed.  This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies.  The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2.  Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution(PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality.  Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established a national regulation based on this claim.  Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA.  The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence.  This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans.  The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Further to the subject of climate orthodoxy enforcement, my February 2016 post quoted from a July 2015 editorial in Science authored by Ms. McNutt. Excerpt:

The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently announced that current commitments to cut CO2 emissions [known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] from the world’s nations are insufficient to avoid warming the entire planet by an average of more than 2°C above the preindustrial level. To set more aggressive targets, developed nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further, and by doing so, create roadmaps for developing nations to leapfrog technologies by installing low-CO2–emitting energy infrastructure rather than coal-fired power plants as they expand their energy capacity.

In the time since 2016, Ms. McNutt and the NAS have been central actors in suppressing dissenting voices in the climate debate.

And here’s something else from the June 2 Science piece:

The presidents of those three honorific societies that together with NRC comprise NASEM—McNutt, John Anderson, and Victor Dzau—each earned more than $1 million in 2023. . . . At a time when hundreds of jobs are at risk, “It is galling that the leadership of the institution makes that kind of money,” says one senior program officer with a decade of experience at the institution.

I can’t think of any reason why any organization headed by Ms. McNutt should get a dime of taxpayer money. Can you?

Science must be reproducible — Part One

 By Dr. Jay Lehr |May 9th, 2022|Regulation, Science|10 Comments

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non profit organization of academics and independent scholars intent on recapturing the essence of scholarship which was so well respected in the past. We once respected all doctors without questioning their level of knowledge. Perhaps you have heard the joke beginning with the question “what do you call an individual who graduated medical school with a D average” the answer is “doctor”. The same was true for academics, college professors, all those that taught us at a college or university. Sadly as government slowly took over 80% of all academic research the standard of excellence declined . The by-words of too much research became “as the fear increases so does the money” and government involvement.

In hopes of bringing back the level of excellence among teachers and researchers NAS was formed. It does research itself into how schools are performing in the modern era. While there remains much that is good, there is a great deal that is bad.

This is the first of three essays taken from their new publication aptly titled Shifting Sands. It focuses on the failing efforts to reproduce scientific research that too often ends up supporting unnecessary or inappropriate government regulations. Much of their book uses the tremendous flaws in EPA’s effort to tighten the already unsupportable air quality regulation of Particulate Matter smaller than two and a half microns (millionth of a meter) which is called their PM2.5 rule. I wrote about the PM2.5 hearing they held by Zoom on February 25 on these pages in the weeks of March 27 and April 4, 2022. All but two of those who testified opposed EPA’s effort to tighten the current rule. There were 15 of us testifying against their plan. The EPA panel on the conference call did not ask a single question of the 15 people giving testimony in opposition. We suspect they had no interest in even listening to us. We all agreed that none of the evidence EPA was using to tighten the PM 2.5 rule could be reproduced even if their data could be obtained.

An irreproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social scientific disciplines from epidemiology to social psychology. Science has always had a layer of untrustworthy results published in respectable places and experts who are eventually shown to be sloppy, mistaken or untruthful. Herman Muller even won the Nobel Prize for his fraudulent studies of the fruit fly, which is now known to have resulted in the unsupportable Linear No Threshold model that has handicapped work on medical radiation for more than a half century. But the irreproducibility crisis is something new. It’s magnitude has brought many scientists confidence in other’s research to a very skeptical position. And most of today’s work is performed on the public’s dollar. A majority of modern research may well be wrong. How much government regulation is actually built on irreproducible science.

In the NAS text Shifting Sands the authors included 8 sources of misdirection leading to irreproducibility. They include:

• Malleable research plans
• Legally inaccessible data sets
• Opaque methodology and algorithms
• Undocumented data cleansing
• Inadequate or non existent data archiving
• Flawed statistical methods
• Publication bias hiding negative results
• Political or disciplinary group think (political correctness)

Government regulation is meant to clear a high barrier of proof. Regulations should be based on a large body of scientific research, the combined evidence of which provides sufficient certainty to justify reducing American’s liberty with a government regulation.

The justifiers of regulations based on flimsy or inadequate research often cite the “precautionary principle”. They would say that instead of being a regulation on rigorous science, they base the regulation on the possibility that a scientific claim is accurate. They do this with the logic that it is too dangerous to wait for the actual validation of a hypothesis, and the lower standard of reliability is warranted when dealing with matters that might involve severely adverse outcomes. The invocation of the precautionary principle is not only non-scientific, but is also an inducement to accepting poor science and even fraud.

We are living with this right now as the government wants to stop the use of fossil fuels because of a belief that it could lead the earths’ temperature to an unwanted level. No such proof of this exists.

The political consequences have unavoidably had the affect of tempting political activists to skew scientific research in order to impact the manner in which the government weighs evidence. Any formal system of assessment inevitably invites attempts to game it.

To all this we must add the distorting effects of massive government funding of scientific research. Our federal government is the largest single funder of research in the world. It’s expectations affect not only the research it directly funds, but also all research done in hopes of receiving federal funding. Government experts therefore have it in their power to create a skewed body of research which they can use to justify regulations.

A 2020 report prepared for the Natural Resource Defense Council estimates that American air pollution regulations cost $120 billion per year, and we may take that estimate provided to us by an environmental advocacy group to be the lowest plausible number.

It is time for US citizens to know all this and react to it in a manner that begins swinging the pendulum back toward more reliable research conclusions.

Note: Portions of this essay were excerpted from the book Shifting Sands with permission of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and its authors Peter Wood, Stanley Young, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall.

Author

• Dr. Jay Lehr

  CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.