Trump Is Mad at Jared Polis. Now He’s Dismantling Colorado’s Leading Weather Research Institution.

The Trump administration plans to dismantle the nation’s leading weather research facility in Colorado — a decision the White House suggested was directly related to Gov. Jared Polis’ refusal to cooperate with Trump.

“Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS in an email on Wednesday.

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, cited “climate alarmism” when he announced late Tuesday that the massive, decades-old Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research would be broken up. That same day, the president called Polis “weak and pathetic” and “incompetent” over his refusal to release former Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters from prison.

Trump signed a pardon for Peters last week, even though Peters was jailed for state crimes related to her 2020 voting machine data tampering scheme, meaning Trump’s pardon was merely symbolic.

Polis’ office did not immediately respond to request for comment about the White House tying the disbanding of the NCAR to Polis refusing to cooperate with Trump.

“Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science,” Polis said in a statement about the shutdown of the facility. “NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

This is not the first time Vought has threatened to pull critical programs in blue states. During the government shutdown this fall, Vought announced that key funding for major transit projects in New York and New Jersey would be canceled, something Democrat Mikie Sherrill highlighted in her successful bid for New Jersey governor.

Vought also threatened to pull resources from Army Corps of Engineers projects in states led by Democrats, although there is still no evidence that the agency ever actually followed through on those threats.

In the case of the NCAR, Vought isn’t threatening to pull funding so much as take apart an enormous collaborative institution that has existed for more than 50 years. The NCAR is funded by the National Science Foundation, and its many projects include building national security tools for the Army and Pentagon, designing cutting-edge crop planning technology for farmers, and spearheading the research that dramatically reduced the rate of fatal plane crashes in the United States.

It houses some of the country’s most sophisticated weather models, computers and technology, and nearly all research related to weather, Earth’s atmosphere, and climate change in the United States runs through the center in some way. In addition to its laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, the NCAR manages two research airplanes and a data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

“All Americans rely on forecasts produced by atmospheric models developed at NCAR every day. They’ve done tremendous work on aviation weather safety,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’s state climatologist and a meteorologist at Texas A&M University. “Their facilities are relied upon by atmospheric scientists everywhere. Their training opportunities for young atmospheric scientists are unparalleled.”

“This is really a genuinely shocking, self-inflicted wound to American competitiveness writ large at a very high level,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources, in a livestream Wednesday.

But the White House doesn’t appear to see it that way, calling it the “premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy” in an email to NOTUS. In response to questions about NCAR’s national security efforts, an official said “vital functions” will be moved under the purview of other entities or into other locations.

The official also provided a list of projects conducted by NCAR that it sees as veering from “strong or useful science.”

The White House list consisted of only four projects of the hundreds conducted in recent years, including one conducted in the summer of 2014 in Colorado to measure summertime ozone air quality. The list also includes a review paper — a relatively small effort compared to most of NCAR’s work — that examined how offshore wind turbines might need to be further strengthened to withstand damage from hurricanes.

Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a frequent critic of mainstream climate science, called the White House decision “ridiculous and dumb” in a post on X.

Several scientists who work for the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although they are not authorized to speak with reporters, posted online about how their weather forecasting efforts depend heavily on NCAR.

“I use NCAR-based software everyday to help identify and track regions of excessive precipitation to help NWS forecasters protect lives and property. NCAR is extremely valuable and we need them,” Noah Brauer, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center, wrote on Bluesky, adding that tools developed and supported by the institute are vital to efforts to improve public safety.

“NSF NCAR’s research is crucial for building American prosperity by protecting lives and property, supporting the economy, and strengthening national security. Any plans to dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our nation’s ability to predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters,” said Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR on behalf of NSF, in a statement.

This article has been updated with additional comments.