“They cannot hide their decision making from the American people.” That was Hana Vizcarra, deputy managing attorney at Earthjustice, on the day her organization filed suit against the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Management and Budget over the planned breakup of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The plaintiffs are the Union of Concerned Scientists, which Earthjustice represents, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Both had filed several Freedom of Information Act requests about the administration’s decision to dismantle NCAR and end its climate research. Neither has had a substantive answer.
How the breakup came about
OMB Director Russell Vought announced in December 2025 that NSF would break up the center. Documents released in a separate suit, brought by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the university consortium that manages NCAR, show that OMB and NSF decided to eliminate its climate modeling and research work.
The plaintiffs say that would leave the country with a weaker grasp of how increasingly extreme weather endangers Americans.
FOIA lets anyone request records from federal agencies, which must hand them over unless a narrow exemption applies. Classification for national security is one. A bar under another law is another.
What NCAR does
NCAR combines observations, modeling, supercomputing and applied research. Its output feeds weather forecasts, aviation safety, agricultural planning and flood risk assessment, and the plaintiffs tie it to public safety, economic output and national defense.
Dr. Carlos Martinez, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the center has produced life-saving weather and climate science for more than six decades. “Losing NCAR would set back scientific research, with real consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods,” he said. “As a taxpayer-funded public good, NCAR belongs to all of us, and we deserve to know the rationale and deliberations behind any effort to dismantle or restructure it.”
Erin Murphy, lead counsel for clean air and energy markets at the Environmental Defense Fund, put it in terms of access. “The public has the right to know about the Trump administration’s secretive, harmful actions to dismantle essential climate science research at NCAR,” she said.
Vizcarra went further, accusing the administration of threatening “to wreck the most important weather lab in the United States.”
