The Trump administration is reviewing proposals to break up one of the world’s leading climate and weather laboratories, transfer its work to universities and private companies, take away its aircraft, and sell its property in Boulder, Colo.
The laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has been targeted for months by the Trump administration. In a social media post in December, Russell Vought, the White House budget director, called the Colorado center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters.
Scientists say the move to dismantle the center would weaken research that is crucial to understanding the atmosphere, space and oceans, air pollution and climate change. It would leave emergency officials and planners less prepared for extreme weather events, critics said.
The center’s staff includes about 830 employees working under the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of colleges and universities that oversees the center for the federal government.
The center also operates a massive supercomputer, known as Derecho, in Cheyenne, Wyo., that scientists use to predict the behavior of wildfires, space weather, hurricanes and other complex weather patterns.
Proposals are due on Friday to the National Science Foundation from institutions that want to take over management of the center’s research portfolio and various facilities; comments from the public about the center’s future are also due then.
Michael England, a spokesman for N.S.F., which oversees the center, said the proposals and comments from interested parties would not be made public. He would not say when the officials would make a final decision about the fate of the center.
“I don’t have anything on that for you,” Mr. England said.
Colorado’s elected officials have been fighting to preserve the center. Putting it on the chopping block would also be an economic blow to the state. President Trump has feuded with Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, over Mr. Trump’s pardoning of a former Colorado election official who was convicted of multiple state felonies after she gave Mr. Trump’s supporters unauthorized access to voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
“Breaking up the institution would have detrimental impacts,” Gov. Polis said in a statement on Thursday. “People evacuate more quickly and safely from fires because of NCAR.”
The center’s data, Mr. Polis said, “improve forecasting of severe weather events like fires and floods, support safer aviation and transportation, and help businesses and communities make informed decisions.”
In a letter to the N.S.F.’s acting director, Brian Stone, Representatives Joe Neguse, a Democrat, and Jeff Hurd, a Republican, wrote that dismantling the center would increase costs and “erode critical research capacity, disrupt longstanding partnerships, and diminish our ability to understand, anticipate and respond to extreme weather-related risks.”
Mr. Neguse said that the proposals and comments should be made public, and that he intended to press N.S.F. should it refrain from doing so.
He has asked the N.S.F. inspector general to review allegations from a whistle-blower that Trump administration officials began negotiating the transfer of the center’s space weather program to a private company in January, before the review had been completed.
According to Mr. Neguse’s letter to the inspector general, the whistle-blower confirmed the report with an employee of an unnamed for-profit company during a January meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Houston.
“I remain deeply concerned about any attempts to improperly transfer public assets to private companies,” Mr. Neguse wrote.
Scott Rayder, the chief executive of Lynker, a firm in Leesburg, Va., that provides space weather forecasts for the U.S. military and other federal agencies, said that he was submitting a proposal to the N.S.F. to take over management of the center’s High Altitude Observatory, whose scientists study solar flares, space radiation and other atmospheric phenomena.
“Our thinking here was that this is important and we need to save it,” Mr. Rayder said about the observatory. “These are critical functions. If you are going to break them up, don’t let them go. They need to be kept together.”
Mr. Rayder said in an interview that his firm had not been negotiating with officials from the Trump administration. Scott McIntosh, Lynker’s vice president for space operations, was the deputy director at the center until 2024 and also ran the observatory.
The University of Oklahoma is making a proposal to the N.S.F. “on how the nation can best preserve that legacy and organize our atmospheric science capabilities to meet current and future needs,” said Matthew Wade Hulver, the university’s vice president for research and partnerships.
The University of Wyoming has begun negotiations with N.S.F. officials about taking over management of the Derecho supercomputer, according to Chad Baldwin, a university spokesman.
Mr. Baldwin said it was too early to know who would set the research priorities for the supercomputer. But some scientists say the university’s goals may not match the priorities of the larger U.S. scientific research community.
“How much will be focused on climate versus weather versus other disciplines?” said Carlos Javier Martinez, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, and a former postdoctoral researcher at the center.
“It feels rushed,” Dr. Martinez said about the N.S.F. process. “I question whether the public comment period is of good faith.”
Also unclear is the fate of the center’s Mesa Laboratory, which was founded in 1960, designed by the famed architect I.M. Pei, and used as the setting for the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy film “Sleeper.”
In a January letter, the N.S.F. said that it wanted proposals to sell the buildings and transfer the center’s two high-flying research aircraft to another federal agency.
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