he Federal Judicial Center (FJC) has had its fair share of controversies throughout the past year.
The taxpayer-funded agency was caught stuffing citations to left-wing climate activists into its most recent Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which offers guidance to federal judges on science-related cases. Subsequent Federalist investigations also revealed the radical left-wing partisanship of the authors tasked with writing manual’s climate and forensics sections.
The FJC is intended to serve as the unbiased educational and research arm of the judiciary. Although it doesn’t have any “policy-making or enforcement authority,” these findings have raised concerns about its objectivity and central role in providing “accurate, objective information and education” to judges across America’s federal court system.
But the deeper The Federalist digs into the FJC, the further removed the agency seems to be from its stated mission.
A new inquiry into the FJC unearthed that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — a left-wing advocacy group masquerading as an objective science organization — influenced the FJC’s aforementioned science manual. In line with The Federalist’s prior reporting, this investigation also uncovered that several of the AAAS fellows who worked on the manual have a history of supporting left-wing ideology.
Origins and Leadership
Before fleshing out the AAAS’s influence on the judiciary and FJC, it’s worth exploring the group’s left-wing background.
According to the Capital Research Center (CRC), the AAAS’s origins can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when it was created to “unify all scientific fields across the United States” and “rais[e] further resources for scientific inquiry.” The group later shifted its focus in the decades that followed from solely pursuing research funding to “general policy lobbying.”
During this step into activism, the AAAS “began to tilt towards socialism and the Soviet Union” in the late 1930s, according to CRC. The nonprofit watchdog noted the left-wing science group’s annual president at the time, Walter Bradford Cannon, “expressed his sympathies for socialism as a model of the scientific economy and society of the future, a position many of his fellow ‘science-activists’ in the AAAS shared.”
The AAAS has carried its partisan agenda forward by increasing its involvement in left-wing “‘science-activism,’ ideological activism performed in the guise of promoting science.” The group was notably involved in the 2017 “March for Science” that protested the first Trump administration’s pro-energy policies.
This left-wing activism is perhaps unsurprising when considering the partisanship displayed by the AAAS’s leadership. The group’s current CEO, Sudip Parikh, has regularly criticized the Trump administration and its policy agenda, including the president’s 2020 move to withdraw America from the World Health Organization over its mishandling of Covid. He also attacked a 2022 Supreme Court decision (West Virginia v. EPA) limiting the EPA’s regulatory authority over “greenhouse gas emissions.”
Parikh’s predecessor, former Rep. Rush D. Holt, Jr., D-N.J., appears to be cut from the same cloth. According to CRC, he criticized President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and “signed the AAAS as a supporter of an open letter” urging the president to revoke his travel ban during his tenure as CEO.
The AAAS is also bankrolled by numerous left-wing organizations and has inked contracts with the federal government, according to CRC. Its funders have reportedly included the left-wing John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and others.
Hellbound and Down 