Trump plan to dismantle NCAR draws climate-science concern

A White House plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has stirred alarm among climate and weather researchers who say the move would degrade the nation’s forecasting capabilities and research infrastructure. The proposal, disclosed by Russell Vought, director of the White House budget office, would break up NCAR and move some functions to other locations as part of a broader initiative to shrink federal climate research under a policy framework associated with Project 2025. The aims and timing have sparked concerns that politics are driving a decision with far-reaching consequences for weather prediction, wildfire modeling, and basic atmospheric science. The story, originally published by Inside Climate News and republished here as part of Climate Desk, notes that the plan comes amid a string of actions that critics say politicize science and undermine the nation’s climate-resilience research.

The announcement followed the cancellation of about $109 million in federal environmental and safety grants for Colorado, a move that coincided with a public dispute between President Donald Trump and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over the 2020 election aftermath and the handling of a former county election official’s jail sentence. An anonymous White House official cited Polis’s stance on governance as a reason for the administration’s approach, telling national outlets that the governor is not considered cooperative by the White House. In Boulder and across the climate-science community, researchers say the timing signals a political motive that could overshadow the technical rationale for preserving NCAR’s capabilities.

NCAR, founded in 1960 and administered by the National Science Foundation, operates as a hub for data, computation, and field research that connects about 129 North American university partners. It provides access to powerful supercomputers, heavily instrumented aircraft, and earth-system models that underpin both research and real-time forecasting. The center is credited with developing the Dropsonde system used by hurricane hunter aircraft, and its modeling and computational backbone serve national defense needs as well as civilian applications, including wildfire forecasting and severe weather prediction. UCAR, which manages NCAR for NSF, employs thousands of people and has built a sprawling ecosystem of laboratories that contribute to the state’s economy and to international climate science networks. In the climate-science community, NCAR is often described as a global hub, enabling researchers to share data, run simulations, and visualize complex atmospheric phenomena in ways that would be far more expensive and less coordinated if the center’s resources were dispersed.

The administration has framed the move as a reorganization intended to shrink the federal footprint and shrink environmental regulation in line with a broader political agenda. Yet scientists warn that there is no practical way to separate weather from climate on timescales relevant to forecasting and planning. Daniel Swain, a climate expert at the University of California, repeatedly argues that weather and climate operate within the same atmospheric system and are inseparable in practice. He notes that NCAR’s computing resources and data streams are essential to his own research and to the work of hundreds of scientists nationwide who rely on NCAR’s centralized infrastructure to perform high-resolution simulations, generate forecasts, and create public-facing visualization tools that inform emergency responses.

The potential loss of NCAR threatens to slow not only long-range climate projections but also critical, near-term forecasts used to guide wildfire suppression, flood management, and infrastructure planning. Swain and others point out that removing or relocating NCAR’s capabilities could force researchers to build parallel infrastructures at scattered sites, fracturing collaboration, increasing costs, and complicating data sharing. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who has longstanding ties to NCAR, has described the center as an international treasure whose resources span academia, government, and industry. Antonio Busalacchi, president of UCAR, has stressed that NCAR’s work is central to the nation’s scientific ecosystem and that any disruption would reverberate far beyond Colorado.

Colorado Gov. Polis responded to the reports by asserting that the state has not received official information from the federal government about the NCAR plan or the related grant cancellations. Polis highlighted NCAR’s role in delivering data that helps manage severe weather, wildfires, and related hazards, and he warned that cutting the center could erode the United States’ competitive edge in science and technology. Boulder has faced acute wildfire risk in recent days, and utility actions such as preemptive power shutoffs have underscored how forecast-based planning can affect public safety and regional resilience. Polis described the potential cuts as both unsafe and scientifically counterproductive, emphasizing that NCAR’s work extends well beyond climate research to support life- and-property protection during extreme weather events.

In Congress, Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse criticized the plan as retaliatory and described NCAR as one of the world’s premier scientific facilities. He pledged to use legal channels to challenge the move and to defend federal science investments that connect universities, national laboratories, and federal agencies. The White House has offered few public comments beyond confirming the dismantling plan, leaving researchers and policymakers to weigh the broader implications for the national science enterprise and for U.S. leadership in climate and weather research. Critics argue that the plan, if implemented, would undermine a key element of the United States’ climate-surveillance and disaster-response architecture at a moment when the nation faces escalating heat waves, wildfires, drought, and heavy rainfall events across the country.

The plan also directly intersects with the administration’s Project 2025 blueprint, which calls for consolidating and, in some cases, shrinking climate research programs. Proponents say the goal is to streamline governance and reduce perceived duplication, but supporters of NCAR emphasize that the center’s scale and scope enable rapid data access and coordinated modeling that are not easily replicated in a decentralized system. The uncertainty surrounding how NCAR’s functions would be redistributed — or whether they would survive as an integrated entity at all — has deepened anxiety among universities, federal agencies, and the broader scientific community about future funding, staffing, and collaboration opportunities.

As the debate unfolds, observers emphasize that weather and climate research today depends on integrated, cross-institution networks rather than isolated programs. NCAR’s potential dissolution would mark a historic shift in how the United States organizes its most advanced climate science infrastructure, with consequences that could be felt in classrooms, laboratories, and the field for decades to come. The questions now are not only about budget lines, but about strategic choices that will influence the nation’s capacity to forecast severe weather, understand a rapidly changing climate, and anticipate the impacts of those changes on communities, industries, and ecosystems.