National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 3rd of March 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed a congressional act that created the National Academy of Sciences, with a mandate both simple and sweeping: whenever any department of the government called upon it, the Academy would investigate, examine, experiment, and report. The Civil War was still raging. The Union needed science. What Lincoln set in motion that day would grow, over the next century and a half, into the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a body that now produces some 200 reports every year and counts more than 6,300 members across its three constituent academies. How does an institution chartered in wartime become one of the most consequential scientific advisory bodies on earth? What holds it together, and who actually pays for it? And what happens when the answers it delivers become inconvenient?

• 2. Built for War, Kept for Peace

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  Nitric acid was the substance basic to the making of propellants such as cordite, high explosives, dyes, and fertilizers, and World War I was cutting off its supply. The National Research Council, created in 1916 at the request of President Woodrow Wilson, set its first major committee to work on that problem. The Committee on Nitric Acid Supply, approved by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, recommended importing Chilean saltpeter and building four new ordnance plants. The War Department accepted those recommendations in June 1917, though the plants were not finished before the armistice.

  Wilson himself framed the NRC's purpose as stimulating research in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences and applying them to engineering, agriculture, medicine, and other useful arts. When war was first declared, the council had already organized committees on anti-submarine and gas warfare. On the 1st of June 1917, the NRC convened a joint meeting with scientific representatives from the United Kingdom and France to tackle submarine detection. A follow-up meeting in Paris in October 1918 yielded new details from the British and French about their methods. The combined effort produced a sound-based method of detecting submarines, a success significant enough to keep the NRC intact after the fighting stopped, though it was gradually separated from military command. Wilson formalized its existence in 1918 under Executive Order 2859.

• 3. Three Academies, One Charter

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  The National Academy of Engineering came into being in 1964, and the body now called the National Academy of Medicine was created in 1970, originally under the name Institute of Medicine, before being rechartered as NAM in 2015. All three operate under the same congressional charter Lincoln signed, which means the legal continuity runs unbroken from 1863 to the present.

  Each academy elects its own members annually, judging candidates on distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The combined membership of more than 6,300 scientists, engineers, and health professionals serves pro bono as advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine, the exact phrase written into the original 1863 charter. No member is paid for this service. The three academies jointly govern the operating arm of the institution, the body formerly called the National Research Council, whose Articles of Organization have been formally amended only three times: in 1956, January 1993, and July 2015.

• 4. How a Study Gets Made

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  When the National Academies take on a question, they draw from a pool far wider than their own membership. Top scientists, engineers, health professionals, and other experts who are not members are routinely enlisted for study committees. Every one of these committee members serves without pay. The external sponsor, whether a federal agency, a state government, a foundation, or a private funder, hands over its budget and agrees on a statement of task, then steps back entirely; it has no control over what the committee finds or how it reports its conclusions.

  Committees gather evidence in public sessions but deliberate behind closed doors, specifically to guard against political pressure, special-interest lobbying, and sponsor influence. Every finished report then passes through an independent external review run by the internal Report Review Committee, which draws members from all three academies. Federal agencies are the primary funders of this work, but the National Academies also rely on their own endowment and private grants. Since 2011, the full PDFs of all National Academies Press publications have been available for free download, and the press makes all publications available for free online reading.

• 5. Reports That Moved Policy

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  In 2001, the NRC published a report on climate change science that explicitly endorsed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusion: that most of the warming observed over the previous fifty years was likely due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, and that human-induced warming and sea level rise were expected to continue through the twenty-first century. A follow-up report in 2013, focused on abrupt climate change, broke new ground by examining not only sudden shifts in the physical climate system but also abrupt impacts on natural and human systems that can cascade across multiple interconnected domains.

  A 2013 NRC report on sexual assault found that approximately 80 percent of sexual assaults go unreported to law enforcement. That report recommended that the National Crime Victimization Survey change its interview methods and the wording of its questions to victims. Clinical supervisor and therapist Amber Stevenson of the Nashville Sexual Assault Center, quoted in coverage of the report, argued that victim-blaming was the core obstacle: the conversation, she said, needs to shift to the person who chose to rape. The report on alcohol and health, issued in 2025, took on a similarly charged question, finding with moderate certainty that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with lower all-cause mortality but also with increased breast cancer risk in females.

• 6. Money, Independence, and Conflicts

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  About 70 percent of the National Academies budget comes from federal funds, a figure reported by the New York Times in 2023. The remainder comes from private donations given by individuals, nonprofits, and corporations including Chevron, Google, Merck, and Medtronic. None of those private donors control what the Academies conclude. In fiscal year 2018, the Department of Transportation was the single largest federal contributor, providing more than $81 million. The Department of Defense contributed more than $33 million that same year, and the Department of Health and Human Services added more than $18 million. The grand total for 2018 across all sources was just under $264 million.

  The question of donor influence became pointed when it emerged that the Academies received $19 million from the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, between 2000 and 2021, during the same period it was advising the government on opioid policy. That overlap raised questions the institution's independence rules were designed to prevent. One structural safeguard is that sponsors have no authority over results once a study is underway. But the arrival of private pharmaceutical money during a national opioid crisis tested whether that firewall holds in practice, and the Fostering Integrity in Research report, updated in 2017 from the original 1992 version, had already flagged a growing crisis of reproducibility in published science as a sign that transparency standards across many fields had fallen short.