Federal judge blocks NSF supercomputer transfer, cites Trump retribution

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, founded in 1960, sits in Boulder, Colorado, in a Mesa Laboratory designed by I.M. Pei and completed in 1967. For more than six decades, NCAR has supplied the research backbone for American weather forecasting, wildfire prediction, hurricane tracking, and climate modeling. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research — a nonprofit consortium of more than 100 universities — has managed NCAR under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation since the center's founding.

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center opened in Cheyenne in 2012, with a $35 million Derecho supercomputer installed in 2023. Derecho runs at 19.87 petaflops — nearly 20 quadrillion calculations per second — and serves roughly 2,000 scientists studying everything from air pollution and solar storms to flood modeling and severe weather forecasting.

Congress created NSF in 1950 under Public Law 81-507, signed by President Truman on May 10. The law grew from Vannevar Bush's 1945 report 'Science: The Endless Frontier,' which recommended a peacetime federal agency to fund basic research at colleges and universities. NSF's first budget was just $151,000. By the time NCAR was founded in 1960, NSF had grown into the primary federal funder of non-medical scientific research — its annual budget reaching $123 million for NCAR alone by fiscal year 2025.

In October 2024, a Colorado state court sentenced former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to nine years in prison after a jury convicted her on seven charges, including felony counts, related to her role in breaching county election equipment in 2021. Peters had invited an outside election denier into a restricted elections office to copy the hard drive of the county's voting system, then publicly released the data. Trump repeatedly championed Peters as a victim of Democratic retribution.

On December 10, 2025, Trump posted on social media calling Colorado Gov. Jared Polis a "weak and pathetic man" for not blocking Peters's imprisonment. The very next day, White House Budget Director Russell Vought announced on X that "The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado," calling it "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." The Department of Transportation canceled $109 million in Colorado transportation grants the same week.

The Administrative Procedure ActAdministrative Procedure Act1946 law governing how federal agencies develop regulations and make decisions through rulemaking and adjudication.Key ConceptAdministrative Procedure Act1946 law governing how federal agencies develop regulations and make decisions through rulemaking and adjudication.Open conceptBookmark, signed by President Truman on June 11, 1946, was the product of a decade-long fight over how to constrain the growing federal administrative state. Congress passed the original Walter-Logan regulatory reform bill in 1940 — FDR vetoed it. After years of compromise, the Senate passed the APA unanimously on March 12, 1946, and the House approved it with no dissent on May 24. The APA requires agencies to publish proposed rules, collect public comment in good faith, and provide a reasoned explanation for major decisions. Courts may strike agency action as 'arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law' when an agency fails to consider relevant factors or substitutes political animus for analysis.

NSF issued a Dear Colleague Letter on January 23, 2026, announcing it was exploring a transfer of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center stewardship and setting a March 13 deadline for public responses. More than 550 scientists, universities, and scientific organizations — including the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union — submitted formal comments urging NSF to keep UCAR in control. The agency announced the transfer anyway, without waiting for the comment period to close and without acknowledging the responses it had received.

NSF signaled it intended to hand control to the University of Wyoming — a state institution in a Republican-controlled state — without a competitive solicitation process or any documented finding that UCAR had failed in its stewardship.

UCAR filed suit in federal court in March 2026, naming NSF, NOAA, the Department of Commerce, and the Office of Management and Budget as defendants. The complaint alleged violations of the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, arguing that NSF had violated its own procedures, failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the transfer, and was acting out of political animus rather than any legitimate policy need. UCAR also sought a preliminary injunctionPreliminary InjunctionA court order that temporarily blocks a government action or policy while a lawsuit challenging it works through the courts.Key ConceptPreliminary InjunctionA court order that temporarily blocks a government action or policy while a lawsuit challenging it works through the courts.Open conceptBookmark to pause the transfer while the case proceeded.

At the May 2026 hearing on the injunction request, UCAR's lawyers presented the December 2025 sequence — Trump's Polis attack followed immediately by Vought's NCAR announcement — as direct evidence of retaliatory motive. Federal judges may strike agency action as "arbitrary and capriciousArbitrary and CapriciousThe legal standard courts use to strike down agency rules that lack reasoned explanation.Key ConceptArbitrary and CapriciousThe legal standard courts use to strike down agency rules that lack reasoned explanation.Open conceptBookmark" when political vengeance, rather than reasoned analysis, drives a decision.

Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued the 38-page preliminary injunction on June 1, 2026. Jackson — appointed by President Obama, confirmed 96-to-0 by the Senate in August 2011 — found that NSF's decision met the legal standard of "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law" under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Jackson wrote that "even considering the administrative record as a whole, there is no evidence that NSF has ever expressed dissatisfaction with UCAR's stewardship, identified performance deficiencies, or otherwise articulated concerns regarding UCAR's management justifying a change of this magnitude." The agency offered no explanation for why UCAR was the wrong operator.

Jackson explicitly addressed the political retaliation allegations, writing that "to the extent that the transfer decision was motivated, even in part, by political or personal animus, as opposed to an analysis of the relevant facts and data, it would demonstrate that the agency acted arbitrarily and capriciously." The ruling noted the tight temporal sequence — Trump's attack on Polis, Vought's NCAR announcement the next morning — as evidence that "retaliation played at least some role" in the federal action.

The injunction preserves UCAR's control of the Derecho supercomputer while the underlying lawsuit proceeds. Jackson also found that UCAR was likely to succeed on the merits of its claims, a higher legal bar than simply showing the agency acted improperly.

NSF's failure to follow its own public-comment process was central to the ruling. Agencies operating under the Administrative Procedure Act must collect public input in good faith — not as window dressing — before making major structural decisions. By announcing the transfer before the March 13 comment deadline and then ignoring more than 550 responses, NSF violated a core APA requirement: that agencies consider "all relevant factors" before acting.

The University of Wyoming had already submitted a proposal to manage the supercomputer. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and the state's Republican congressional delegation had pushed for the transfer, framing it as a workforce and economic development opportunity for Wyoming.

Colorado's two Democratic senators moved aggressively to protect NCAR before the ruling. Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper placed holds on a federal appropriations package in December 2025 specifically to demand NCAR funding protections. After Jackson's ruling, Bennet called it "a critical step in the right direction for science, the hundreds of public servants at NCAR, public safety, and Colorado," adding that the judge made clear "this was a politically motivated effort to undermine one of our nation's most important scientific institutions."

NCAR supports research that benefits every American regardless of state politics — its climate and weather models feed into NOAA's National Weather Service forecasts, wildfire behavior predictions used by the U.S. Forest Service, and aviation safety planning across the country.

NCAR's Derecho supercomputer serves roughly 2,000 scientists from more than 100 universities in the UCAR consortium, including researchers who depend on it for hurricane track modeling, wildfire spread prediction, air quality forecasting, and solar storm analysis. Rural communities across the West, aviation safety offices, and emergency managers in wildfire-prone regions all rely on NCAR's computational output.

The UCAR lawsuit is part of a broader legal pattern: more than 150 federal lawsuits have challenged Trump administration agency actions under the APA since January 2025, with courts finding "arbitrary and capricious" action in cases ranging from NIH grant terminations to USAID shutdowns. The NCAR case adds a politically unusual dimension — a federal court explicitly crediting evidence that the President used an executive agency as a weapon of political revenge against a state government.

Tina Peters, whose imprisonment triggered the retaliatory sequence, was released from prison on the same day Jackson issued his ruling — June 1, 2026 — after Gov. Polis commuted her sentence in May following a Colorado appeals court ruling that overturned her nine-year sentence and ordered resentencing.