Penn professors criticize Trump administration’s ‘devastating’ shutdown of atmospheric research center

As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke to several Penn professors about the University-wide implications of the shutdown. 

The National Center for Atmospheric Research — housed under the National Science Foundation — supports climate and atmospheric research at universities nationwide. Senior White House official Russell Vought confirmed the center's shutdown in a Dec. 16, 2025 social media post, describing it as "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism" in the country. 

Assistant professor of political science Parrish Bergquist, who studies climate and energy policymaking, told the DP that researchers investigating climate change heavily rely on National Center for Atmospheric Research data. 

She described the shutdown announcement as "devastating," citing the importance of climate research in public health, the economy, and people's livelihoods. 

Located in Boulder, Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research conducts in-house research and provides resources such as data services, open-source models, and educational tools to academic researchers across the country. Among other contributions, the center's research contributes to extreme weather event prediction, water management, and air quality forecasting.

"It inserts this black hole into our understanding of what is going on in the world," Bergquist said. "It doesn't change that the climate is changing. It just undermines our ability to understand it and understand what to do about it."

Bergquist described the shutdown as an "indicator" of 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump's administration's wider rollback of federal funding initiatives. Losses in federal funding, Bergquist added, cannot be fully offset by funding from non-governmental entities. 

Due to the cuts, Bergquist told the DP that she will no longer be applying for government grants for her research.

Associate professor of Earth and environmental science Irina Marinov wrote in a statement to the DP that the recent shutdown announcement, as well as prior Trump administration "attacks" on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and cuts to government grants, are "immensely destructive to climate science."

“I am so overwhelmed with the impacts of the Trump administration on my research and the climate community in general, that I have to work even harder than before to simply keep afloat,” Marinov wrote.

Marinov also said the National Center for Atmospheric Research shutdown may disrupt her teaching. 

“I am running a class (Climate and Big Data) this semester on the NCAR supercomputers, and it is unclear whether I can proceed with the plans, if the students will be allowed to run models on the computers or not,” she wrote. “I am on standby, waiting to see what will happen and if we can do climate model analysis in my research group and in my classes in the future at all.”

Professor of Earth and environmental science Leigh Stearns — a glaciologist and climate scientist who uses climate data to understand how Earth’s processes are changing in a warming climate — voiced similar concerns.

“So many things rely on NCAR products that we don't even know about," Stearns said in an interview with the DP. "So it's just shaking the foundation of a lot of science right now, and that's sad and terrifying."

Stearns also uses the center's modeling tools in her classes at Penn, and said losing access to them would negatively affect her students.

According to a Dec. 17, 2025 press release from the National Foundation for Science, “NSF remains committed to providing world-class infrastructure for weather modeling, space weather research and forecasting, and other critical functions.”

Stearns told the DP that the administration’s claim that it will continue weather forecasting but not climate research “doesn’t make sense."

“To understand how more or less sea ice in the Arctic is going to impact the jet stream and air travel on a specific day, those are all related," Stearns said. "It's really impossible to separate one axis of inquiry from the other."

Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics Sarah Light — who conducts research at the intersection of environmental law, corporate sustainability, and business innovation — considered the future of climate research following the shutdown in a statement to the DP. 

She wrote, “With the dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, universities must continue their work in providing critical data and objective information about climate science to support research and climate preparedness." 

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