Rules that agency failed to follow its own procedures in pursuing breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

Jun 01, 2026

It is a late newsletter today (dealing with some unexpected life issues today — all good now). I am going to punt the normal Monday tropical post today due to a breaking news story, namely a key development in the ongoing battle surrounding the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and the Trump Administration’s effort to disband it.

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the consortium of 129 universities that has operated NCAR for decades, filed a federal lawsuit in March seeking to stop those plans from moving forward. Today, Senior United States District Judge Brooke Jackson issued a preliminary injunction focused on the National Science Foundation’s ongoing efforts to move NCAR’s Wyoming Computing Center from control of NCAR/UCAR to the University of Wyoming.

While the injunction focused on halting the planned imminent transfer of the computing center, the judge ruled in her injunction notice that in developing and executing its plans for dismantling NCAR, that NSF had not followed its own administrative procedures in pursuing the reorganization. This included NSF announcing their decision to break off the supercomputing center more than a month before its own deadline for the public to submit feedback about NCAR and potential reorganization:

Yet, fewer than three weeks after issuing the DCL— and more than a month before the official deadline—NSF informed UCAR that it had already decided to transfer stewardship (of the supercomputing center) and publicly announced the same. NSF’s flagrant disregard of its own mechanism for receiving and considering stakeholder and public feedback further illustrates the arbitrary and capricious nature of the agency’s decision.

The judge also noted that “one of the basic procedural requirements of administrative rulemaking is that an agency must give adequate reasons for its decision” and that NSF had also failed to meet this condition with the limited explanations it has provided, and that the move of the supercomputing facility would cause UCAR “irreparable harm.”

You can read the full ruling here — the bottom line appears to be that while the injunction focuses on the supercomputing facility, the judge’s findings in the ruling also appear to cast serious doubt on the broader aspects of NSF reorganization effort. As Science noted in their article on the ruling, “the ruling is only the first skirmish in what is likely to be a much longer legal battle. UCAR is still seeking a broad injunction against NSF making additional changes at NCAR, and the state of Colorado has also sought to prevent any changes in a separate case.”