On December 16, 2025, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought posted on social media that the Trump administration planned to “break up” the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, the largest federal climate research center in the U.S. When asked about the plan for NCAR, a senior White House official referenced Democratic Governor Jared Polis, saying “[m]aybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served” and described NCAR as “the premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy.”
Since 1960, NCAR has studied interactions among Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and the sun, performing critical climate research and helping improve weather forecasts, wildfire behavior prediction, and flooding and drought risk assessment. Experts contend that closing the center would be short-sighted and would devastate climate research. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, said that dismantling NCAR would be “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
Updates:
Additional Anti-Science Action
According to a letter released by the National Science Foundation on February 12, 2026, the Trump administration plans to hand NCAR’s supercomputing facility over to an unnamed third party as part of the ongoing move to dismantle the Center. The computing center runs weather and climate research models that researchers at hundreds of universities across the country use, in part, to improve predictions of extreme weather and climate events.
NCAR director Everette Joseph expressed concern over losing control of, and potentially even access to, the supercomputer, telling staff “[w]e do not yet know who the new managing entity will be, nor do we know the timeline for this transition.”