The Trump administration has targeted a climate and weather research lab as retribution against Colorado officials for imprisoning a county clerk backed by the president who was convicted of helping election deniers meddle with voting equipment in 2020, a lawsuit filed Monday by the lab’s leadership alleged.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of 129 North American universities, filed a lawsuit against four federal agencies and their directors on Monday claiming that the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Boulder, Colo., lab “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.”
The Trump administration has been trying for months to break apart the laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The National Science Foundation, the center’s main funder, said it wants to transfer parts of its research portfolio to other institutions, move the center’s two research aircraft to other federal agencies and sell the institution’s buildings and land, according to a January letter to the scientific community.
These moves have occurred without warning or justification, violating federal law and the Constitution, the lawsuit argued.
“UCAR and NCAR are under attack,” the complaint stated.
The lawsuit is asking a judge to stop the actions, declare the actions unlawful and issue an injunction to prevent the administration from doing any further harm to the center.
A spokesman for the Science Foundation declined to comment citing the litigation. The White House Office of Management and Budget referred inquiries to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment Monday.
A spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Commerce did not respond.
The lawsuit states that President Trump ramped up pressure against Colorado officials beginning last August and that the moves against the laboratory are part of that effort. Mr. Trump, the lawsuit says, has since blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money intended for the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of the U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado and threatened to withhold food stamp benefits from Colorado residents.
Mr. Trump was also demanding all along that Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, release Tina Peters, a county clerk in western Colorado who was convicted in 2024 on charges that she tampered with voting machines in a failed effort to prove Mr. Trump’s false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.
The research center, founded in 1960, employs 830 people and has a budget of $186 million, of which the Science Foundation provides base funding of $125 million. Its scientists and programmers are responsible for computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans that are widely used in forecasting weather events, wildfires, air pollution and natural disasters.
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” and said that the foundation would be “breaking it up.”
Officials at the University Corporation and the atmospheric research center declined to comment. The lawsuit says they are under a gag order from the Science Foundation and are prohibited from speaking to their employees, the scientific community or the media.
The complaint was filed by Michael M. Purpura, a former White House deputy counsel who represented Mr. Trump during his first term during Senate impeachment proceedings in 2020.
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