This story originally appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

David Randall and Christopher Welser are unlikely authorities on the reproducibility crisis in science. Randall, a historian and librarian, is the director of research at the National Association of Scholars, a small higher education advocacy group. Welser teaches Latin at a Christian college in Minnesota. Neither has published anything on replication or reproducibility.

But when a report the two men wrote, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science,” was published by the National Association of Scholars on Tuesday afternoon, it received a Congressional reception. The launch took place in a House office building on Capitol Hill. The Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chairman of the House science committee and one of the most powerful science policymakers in Washington, spoke at the event. In a statement to Undark, he described the NAS report as an “important study.”

The report offers a lucid overview of the reproducibility debate. It also suggests 40 measures to help scientists produce more rigorous, reliable research. Most of these proposed reforms will sound familiar—and welcome—to scientists concerned about the issue.

Other details of the report, though, promise to raise concerns—starting with the involvement of Smith, who has dismissed climate science—or what he calls “the climate change religion”—as liberal alarmism. And indeed, the National Association of Scholars report alludes repeatedly, without offering much evidence, to a looming reproducibility crisis in climate science itself. The organization has a history of promoting climate denialism, and William Happer, a Princeton physicist and climate change skeptic who argues that extra carbon dioxide is good for the planet, wrote the report’s afterword, in which he accuses scientists of hoodwinking “deplorables.”

The report also calls for legislation, long championed by Smith, that many scientists argue could suppress research and helps Republicans in Congress roll back environmental regulations.

To be sure, reproducibility issues pose serious challenges for scientific communities. But what happens when those issues get picked up by political activists? And what, exactly, does the National Association of Scholars hope to achieve with the report?

The NAS (its acronym, confusingly, mirrors that of the National Academy of Sciences) was founded in the 1980s, with a mission to defend the values of the liberal arts. Its membership draws heavily from the ranks of conservative academics. “Pretty much from the beginning, we took threats to the integrity of good science as one of our topics,” NAS president Peter Wood told me. “Anyone who’s concerned about the health and welfare of sciences needs to be concerned about the amount of science that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” he added. “Just because that’s part of who we are and what we do, it seemed like it was about time to try our hand once again at a more systematic treatment of the problem.”

Randall, the report’s co-author, told me that reading a profile of John Ioannidis in The Atlantic had first gotten him interested in reproducibility issues. Ioannidis, now a physician and researcher at Stanford, wrote a blockbuster paper in 2005 expressing “increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.” In the years since, Ioannidis has become a prominent science reformer, and his colleagues have debated whether his claim—if it’s correct—reflects the natural, erratic progress of science, a deep flaw in the modern scientific enterprise, or something in between.

Certainly, the work of Ioannidis and others has helped draw attention to the way scientists review and publish each other’s research. And the NAS report echoes many suggestions that reproducibility advocates have made over the years, including raising the threshold for statistical significance, increasing funding for research replication, pushing researchers to share data, and setting standards that require journals to be more transparent about their process of peer review.