FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 9, 2025
democracyrestored.org

As Democracy Restored has pointed out, the climate industry shouldn’t be interpreting the government’s climate data.

Climate doomsaying just got a little less lucrative – for one large government contractor, at least. POLITICO reports that the Trump administration has canceled the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (USGCRP) contract with global consulting and technology behemoth ICF to produce the National Climate Assessment (NCA), the U.S. government’s “crown jewel” of climate research. Watchdog Democracy Restored has been calling attention to IFC’s outsized influence on U.S. climate policy and applauds the move.

The USGCRP is a little-known group of 15 participating agencies operating out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, charged with creating the NCA every few years. With only a handful of staffers, USGCRP handed the job off to ICF, which had a $34 million contract with NASA to support “the development and release of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the gold-standard for describing the science of climate change and its impacts across the U.S. ICF supported the development of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018.”

A former government official speaking on background told Democracy Restored how critical ICF’s “description” of the climate data is in creating the NCA’s alarmist narrative. In 2017, ICF essentially acted as a ghostwriter for the fourth NCA, choosing what data got priority and how it was interpreted. Even former Obama top scientist and Professor Steven Koonin has written of his concern about the process, describing many of the ways in which misdirection occurs. As Koonin wrote in 2017 concerning the fourth NCA (written by ICF), “it reinforces alarm with incomplete information and highlights the need for more-rigorous review of climate assessments.”

A member of the climate industry should not be responsible for interpreting government climate data. According to its website, ICF has made more than $7.4 billion in federal contracts with a variety of agencies, including more than $638 million from USAID. It’s a good business model: tell the government there’s a problem and collect billions offering ways to cope with it.

Quote from Democracy Restored Director Houston Keene

“This is one step in the right direction toward restoring the integrity in government climate science. Yet given the largesse of the climate lobby and the DOGE revelations, there is likely much more to uncover. Democracy Restored will continue investigating this issue.”

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