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New Lawsuit Contends Trump’s DOE Handpicked Panel of Climate Deniers [1]

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Date: 2025-08

Last month, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a report disputing the long-standing scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate and triggering extreme weather conditions, from record-breaking heat and drought to wildfires, hurricanes, and sea level rise. When it did, the DOE not only contradicted the overwhelming evidence supporting that consensus, but it also violated federal law.

That is the contention of a new lawsuit, filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists, against the Trump administration.

According to the suit, the administration covertly convened a small group of climate contrarians to produce a report that rejects established climate science on the causes and adverse impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relied extensively on the report to help support its proposed move to rescind the agency’s 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding was based on an exhaustive review of the scientific record and serves as the legal underpinning for the EPA’s obligation to regulate carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants from sources like motor vehicles and power plants.

Now, the EPA is arguing both that it lacks the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act and that climate change concerns are overblown.

The agency points to the controversial new report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, to support its new position. The report, commissioned by Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE), had been in the works for several months before it was made public on July 29—the same day the EPA issued its proposal to rescind the endangerment finding. Energy Secretary Chris Wright chose the five authors, all well-known skeptics of established climate science, and tasked them with producing a report that aimed to “cut against the prevailing narrative that climate change is an existential threat,” as the Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher—who served as an internal coordinator of this effort—explained in a blog post.

The work of this small group of climate contrarians, called the Climate Working Group, was kept under wraps, and the existence of the group was not made public until the report was released.

This lack of transparency runs afoul of federal law, EDF and UCS say in their legal challenge.

Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, any group that is assembled to advise or inform the federal government on matters pertaining or relevant to policymaking is subject to specific requirements, including rules around transparency and public participation. The establishment of the group must be disclosed in the Federal Register; members are required to represent balanced points of view; and meetings are supposed to be open to the public.

“The Trump administration did none of that,” Erin Murphy, senior attorney with the EDF, told Sierra. “It convened this small handpicked group to work in secret, which is completely inconsistent with the federal legal requirement to do this report in a public-facing manner.”

The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), she explained, was enacted by Congress in 1972 during the Nixon era to address concerns that special interest groups could exert undue influence on federal government decision-making. “The goal of the Federal Advisory Committee Act is to make sure that when the government is bringing a group of people together to provide expertise, it is done so in a publicly accessible and transparent manner,” Murphy said. “That historic purpose of the law is really being flouted by the Trump administration today.”

H. Christopher Frey, professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University and former head of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development during the Biden administration, explained in a recent article published in The Conversation that the FACA “requires a public process for creating and appointing groups to advise the government and requires that the properly appointed group operates in public view and takes public comments along the way.” He filed a formal request for correction with the Department of Energy on Friday arguing that the agency’s report violated this law and several other statutes intended to protect the integrity of federal science and information.

Also late last week, the EDF and UCS filed a request for preliminary injunction as part of their case, seeking to immediately block the Trump administration’s use of the DOE report. “[We] file this motion to bring an immediate end to the lawless operation of and reliance on the [Climate Working Group] before it is too late to repair the enormous harm being caused,” they state in their August 14 filing.

Murphy said that part of the urgency behind their request stems from the fact that the Trump administration “is moving very quickly” in developing and making use of the report. “It developed this report in secret on a very rapid timeline. Then they released it, and now they are trying to move fast to use this report to undo EPA’s foundational finding that climate change is harmful to people and the environment,” she said.

The Climate Working Group took just two months to draft its 141-page report, which was submitted for internal agency review at the end of May. The final report was released at the end of July and is open to public comments, but only for a short 30-day window that closes on September 2. More than 300 comments have already been submitted to the Federal Register, and until this week DOE did not make any of them public. The docket currently lists 200 comments that are publicly accessible.

“This assessment appears to be manufacturing uncertainty and stoking controversy where there is none."

The larger climate science community has resoundingly criticized the DOE’s report, which was not peer reviewed. Some scientists say their work was misrepresented by the report authors. A recent Carbon Brief analysis revealed that the report contains over 100 false or misleading statements.

“This assessment appears to be manufacturing uncertainty and stoking controversy where there is none,” Carlos Martinez, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Sierra.

The strategy and messaging, he said, closely resembles that of the fossil fuel industry, which has historically denied climate science and downplayed the dangers of fossil-fueled warming. The tactic of assembling five seemingly independent scientists to accentuate uncertainties and manufacture debate, for example, comes straight from a 1998 API strategy document, which explicitly called for the industry to “identify, recruit, and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach.”

Martinez also noted the stark contrast between the DOE report and the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports, the latter of which are peer reviewed and offer multiple opportunities for public comment, involve hundreds of scientists and take several years to produce. “In terms of the credibility here, the contrast is clear as day,” he said.

The Trump administration is now trying to undermine the National Climate Assessment reports. It has fired the scientists working on the next assessment report, proposed to defund the program that coordinates the report production, and removed the existing reports from government websites. Secretary Wright has even reportedly said the administration is considering updating these previous reports.

Martinez said these moves are part of a larger assault by the Trump administration on climate science and information. “We are seeing the removal of climate information like Climate.gov, like [NOAA’s] billion-dollar disasters dataset, which shows how we are seeing a noticeable increase in billion-dollar disasters due to climate change, and NASA satellites on carbon dioxide have been proposed to be removed as well,” he said. “And the timing is very interesting. Between the hiring of those authors and the release of the full [DOE] report, that is when we also saw the removal of these climate websites and climate information.”

Wright’s recent remark about updating the National Climate Assessment reports suggests the administration may be trying not just to remove climate science but to rewrite it along ideological lines. “Now what we’re seeing is the indication of supplementing that gap of climate science with climate disinformation,” Martinez said. “It’s very concerning.”

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[1] Url: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/trump-doe-epa-handpicked-panel-climate-deniers-lawsuit

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