A consumer watchdog group accuses the federally funded National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine of using taxpayer money to support DEI, transgender-related and other left-leaning initiatives, according to a new report.
Consumer Research has compiled a “Woke Alert” report that outlines what it describes as left-leaning research, workshops and grants from the congressionally authorized institution, including projects related to transgender youth, diversity and inclusion initiatives, policing and climate advocacy.
Will Held, executive director of consumer research, accused the organization, which receives 70% of its budget from federal funds, of being “an extremist vigilante organization masquerading as a nonpartisan educational institution.”
“From imposing transgender ideology on children to spreading the ‘defund the police’ craze, this taxpayer-backed organization regularly abuses its standing and reputation to fund favored causes of the left,” Heald said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “You have shamefully used hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to advance a deeply polarizing agenda behind lofty BS rhetoric about independence and objectivity.”
Consumer research has argued that NASEM has demonstrated its allegiance to left-leaning transgender ideology through its various publications, such as a workshop titled “Supporting the Health and Well-Being of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth,” and a book titled “Reducing Inequality Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Cisgender, and Heterosexual Adolescents: Proceedings of a 2022 Workshop.”
The report highlighted that over the years, NASEM has run a variety of DEI workshops with titles including “Promoting anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM organizations: Context and current challenges.”“, and another entitled “Protecting diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education and the workforce,“Which focused on implementing affirmative action without race-based criteria.
In 2022, the National Academies partnered with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to distribute grants worth $1.15 million to each recipient in an effort to promote DEI among biomedical researchers.
In response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Naseem created her movement Commission on Reducing Racial Inequality in the Criminal Justice System. The committee evaluated a proposal to cut $50 million from the police budget in Austin, Texas.
The report noted that commission co-chair Bruce Western accused police officers of “causing a great deal of harm to low-income communities and communities of color.”
In one NASEM study, researchers accused police officers of being “the leading cause of death of young people in the United States.”
The National Academies have also published multiple studies raising concerns about climate change. In one study, academies focused on scaling up technologies that would make Americans more likely to engage in climate activism.
NASEM previously came under fire in August 2025 for publishing a climate review seeking to influence the EPA’s decision on whether to rescind Obama-era greenhouse gas detection. Critics suggested that Naseem was seeking to undermine the authority of the Trump administration.
Roger Pelkey Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in science and technology policy, told Fox News Digital that in recent years, the National Academies have moved from operating under congressional oversight to serving as an “independent actor” for the interests of billionaires and foundations.
The National Academies received funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, a Jeff Bezos project created to address climate change, Pelkey said. Through this support, the National Academies published a guide entitled “Building valid geospatial tools to achieve environmental justicePelkey noted that lawsuits funded by the Bezos Earth Fund have centered on climate change, and said that “there is very strong evidence of bias” in the Bezos Earth Fund.
“So I think the issues around conflicts of interest and bias go beyond just funding sources,” Pelkey said. “It also extends to the groups that researchers choose to partner with when doing work that is supposed to be neutral and scientific.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to NASEM for comment.