DENVER — A consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities filed a lawsuit Monday against their federal partners, alleging the dismantling of Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by the Trump administration is illegal and part of a “campaign of retaliation” against the state of Colorado.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court of Colorado by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research against the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies and its leaders, alleges the dismantling of NCAR is motivated by the Trump administration's opposition to Colorado’s mail-in voting system and the imprisonment of disgraced former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence for tampering with Colorado's election systems in the 2020 presidential election.
UCAR claims that because Colorado refuses to relinquish to the federal government powers the U.S. Constitution has reserved to the state, the defendants have "undertaken a series of retributive actions designed to coerce and punish Colorado."
Among them, the denial of federal disaster relief for wildfires and flooding, the pulling of billions of dollars in funding from social services, President Trump's veto of a bipartisan bill that would have provided clean, drinking water to rural communities in southeastern Colorado, and Trump's decision to relocate U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama.
The lawsuit claims that “UCAR and NCAR are collateral damage” for Colorado’s refusal to bow down to the Trump administration and its demands, and asserts that both agencies are now "targets of the federal government’s campaign of retribution."
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Russell Vought, the director for the Office of Management and Budget, has previously said NCAR’s dismantling was because the facility was “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” In announcing the center's dismantling, Vought never mentioned the Trump administration’s demands for Colorado.
But the lawsuit claims that a White House spokesperson directly tied the dismantling of NCAR to Governor Jared Polis’ “refusal to cooperate with the federal government’s demands” to get rid of mail-in voting or free Peters, which President Trump has repeatedly called for.
Since Vought's announcement in December, the lawsuit claims the Trump administration — through the NSF — has sought to transfer stewardship of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, which helps scientists around the world with climate data and research; issued “disparate” demands for record requests on expenses and grant funds that UCAR characterized as “pointless bureaucratic burdens”; and imposed “unconstitutional restraint on the speech” of employees by banning them from making public comments about NCAR’s dismantling.
The lawsuit also alleges that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration abruptly terminated a multi-million-dollar agreement with UCAR to fund research on climate mitigation and adaptation, and claims the Trump administration is seeking to sell or transfer NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder to a for-profit company, which plaintiffs say would “violate both legal constraints that do not permit the privatization of federal programs and administrative and ethical rules that do not permit predetermined backroom decisions.”
Denver7 reached out to the four agencies named in the lawsuit for comment but has yet to hear back.
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Founded in 1960, NCAR is considered a "global leader in Earth system science” by providing critical data, modeling and weather forecasting that the military, aviation and agriculture industries rely on to make informed decisions about their day-to-day operations.
But the work of the more than 800 employees who work at NCAR doesn’t stop there.
Scientists, engineers, and other support staff inside NCAR help meteorologists with hurricane forecasts, inform firefighters across the country on wildfire danger, and aid NASA in monitoring solar activity that can affect GPS, power grids and satellite operations.
In its relief, UCAR requested that the court “stop implementation of the actions, declare the actions unlawful, and issue an injunction to prevent further harm to NCAR and UCAR’s operations and mission.”
“These actions pose a direct threat to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity and risk setting back the country’s global leadership in weather and space weather modeling and forecasting,” leaders from the consortium said in a news release following announcement of the lawsuit. “We are hopeful that this lawsuit will prevent future unlawful action by the agencies.”
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