A federal judge in Colorado has put a stop to the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, slamming the move as an effort to exact political revenge on the state.
According to The Colorado Sun, Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson called the administration’s plans to transfer NCAR’s supercomputing facility to the University of Wyoming “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
NCAR is a critical facility for climate research, studying changes to Earth’s atmosphere. The Trump administration has long sought to marginalize climate research.
But beyond that ideological issue, Jackson agreed with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the plaintiff in the case, “that breaking off parts of NCAR, dismantling projects and potentially firing thousands of employees was intended by Trump and agency officials as direct political revenge.”
Colorado has been the subject of Trump’s fury multiple times since taking office, including over the imprisonment of Tina Peters, a far-right election conspiracy theorist who tampered with voting equipment to try to prove the 2020 election was stolen. Peters was released on parole this month as part of a highly controversial commutation by outgoing Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.
The state’s senators have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve NCAR, even obstructing national spending bills in protest.
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