The Trump administration said on Tuesday, December 16 that it was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent Earth and atmospheric research institutions, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), based in Colorado. It’s a move that comes amid escalating attacks from the White House against the state’s Democratic lawmakers, who have refused to transfer Tina Peters to federal custody for her state criminal conviction after Trump “pardoned” her. (State crimes are not within the purview of the President’s pardon power.)
In October of 2024, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison and six months in jail for her role in the breach of her own election equipment in 2021.
She had been found guilty by a jury on four felony and three misdemeanor counts, including three counts of attempts to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of first-degree official misconduct, one count of violation of duty, and one count of failure to comply with requirements of the Secretary of State.
So, Trump pardons Peters (and has pardoned anyone else supporting his lies about the 2020 election), calls Governor Polis “weak,” while the “right” threatens violence, and now retribution to Colorado comes in the form of de-funding essential, lifesaving research. Legal? Barely, and clearly wrong. NCAR has been foundational for modern atmospheric and climate science and has generated large, measurable benefits for public safety, the economy, and environmental stewardship. Much of the United States’ forecasting, climate understanding, and related decision‑support capacity either originates at NCAR or depends directly on its models, data, and tools.
But, said Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the White House Officer of Management and Budget, “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
NCAR develops and maintains community models and tools—such as major weather and climate models, observational platforms, and analysis software—that are used by researchers worldwide. Because these models are “community” resources, improvements from many universities and agencies feed back into shared tools, accelerating scientific progress far beyond what any single institution could do alone.
NCAR also operates national facilities including research aircraft, specialized atmospheric instruments, and a supercomputing center in Wyoming that underpins high‑resolution weather and climate simulations. It also curates vast datasets and Earth system models that are openly available to the U.S. and international research communities, enabling studies from basic cloud physics to global climate projections.
These shared facilities reduce duplication and cost: instead of many universities each trying to build and maintain their own aircraft, observatories, or supercomputers, they access NCAR’s platforms, which are funded and managed as national infrastructure. Partnerships with agencies such as NOAA further integrate NCAR tools into operational forecasting systems, creating a “community modeling” framework that improves how quickly research advances reach real-world applications.
NCAR’s mission explicitly includes “fostering the transfer of knowledge and technology for the betterment of life on Earth,” and its strategic priorities emphasize actionable science addressing society’s most pressing environmental challenges. In practice, this has meant delivering tools and insights that underpin life‑saving forecasts, inform climate and infrastructure policy, strengthen national and economic security, and cultivate scientific capacity across universities and communities.
Recent debates over proposals to dismantle NCAR underscore how deeply its work is embedded in U.S. weather and climate services; experts warn that eliminating it would degrade prediction capabilities and impose long‑term costs on safety and the economy. Taken together, the scientific advances, shared infrastructure, workforce development, and risk‑reduction benefits make NCAR a classic example of a public research institution whose social returns substantially exceed its direct budgetary cost.
But the “war against woke” rages on, regardless. A senior White House official cited two instances of the lab’s “woke direction” that wastes taxpayer funds on what the official called frivolous pursuits and ideologies. One funded an Indigenous and Earth Sciences center that aimed to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” while another experiment traced air pollution to “demonize motor vehicles, oil and gas operations.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the administration’s actions.
But for climate scientists the lab “is quite literally our global mothership,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University.
Trump and Vought have the power to do what they want legally, with a supremely supine Congress and a see-no-evil Supreme Court majority. But the wrongs, and so many of them, now seem like a daily occurrence.
[Note: this blog was digitally prepared when I was “wide awake,” using Pete Hegseth’s favorite non-woke font, Times New Roman.]