OPINION: A Darkening Federal Presence Disfigures the Character of Colorado

This op-ed by Quentin Young appeared on Colorado Newsline on December 18, 2025.

NCAR is a prized Colorado landmark.

The modernist federal facility in Boulder that houses the National Center for Atmospheric Research was completed in 1966, having been designed by I.M. Pei, who also created the Louvre Pyramid in Paris. The NCAR building had a star turn in the 1973 comedy “Sleeper.”

The center, which employs more than 800 Coloradans, also happens to conduct some of the best climate research in the world. Its work is crucial for scientific understanding of Earth systems, and it provides early warnings of natural disasters.

But its truth-telling about climate change, and its location in a state dominated by Democrats who have refused to go along with President Donald Trump’s authoritarian abuses of power, might have doomed it. Far-right zealot Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, confirmed a report Tuesday that the National Science Foundation will be “breaking up” NCAR, falsely maligning it as a source of “climate alarmism.”

The dismantling of NCAR wouldn’t just create a dangerous vacuum of knowledge about a warming planet. It would destroy a Colorado point of pride. And it’s only the latest instance of Trump’s degradation of Colorado through his misuse and abuse of federal resources located in the state.

U.S. Northern Command was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on American soil and is headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. But while Coloradans can be proud that protection of the homeland is overseen from their state, their view must now account for the command’s dark mission under Trump, who put it in charge of federalized National Guard troop deployments to American cities.

The deployments are a brute show of force against blue cities and states amid Trump’s out-of-control immigration crackdown and in advance of the 2026 election. They’re meant to intimidate. The Colorado general in charge of them, Gregory Guillot, head of Northern Command, in an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, demonstrated that he enthusiastically approves of the deployments.

Guillot was in the audience during Trump’s infamous speech to top military commanders in September, when the president described his conflict with left-leaning cities as “a war from within.” He told the commanders, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard, but military.”

Asked what he thought of this directive from his commander-in-chief, Guillot offered no reassurance that civilians are safe from his troops when he responded, “I haven’t thought into what he might have meant.”

Few features are more quintessentially Colorado than its wide open natural spaces. But so much of the state’s wildlands are managed by the federal government, which under Trump’s leadership are threatened like never before.

Colorado is home to 23 million acres of federal public lands, which in addition to their outsize role in the state’s appeal and personality are a key economic driver. But MAGA leaders are trying to sell them off. They’re trying to build roads through them to accommodate destructive industry. They’re opening them up to more oil and gas extraction.

Trump has nominated Steve Pearce, an anti-public lands activist and former U.S. representative from New Mexico who has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, to lead the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau manages 8.3 million acres of public lands in Colorado.

The nomination “is an insult to Colorado,” U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said, adding, “Pearce’s views on public lands are completely out of touch with Colorado’s values. He will be the first to sell off our public lands, promote Trump’s misguided ‘drill baby drill’ policies, and demolish the protections that ensure our kids and grandkids will benefit from public lands as we do now.”

Bennet’s statement, touching on Colorado values, underscores the penetrating damage that abhorrent Trump policies pose to the state’s character.

U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Lafayette raised a similar theme when he blasted the decision to crush NCAR, which sits in his district. Referring to the center’s employees, he said, “They are a core component of our state’s economy and an integral part of the fabric of Colorado.”

As Trump’s infinite corruption and lawlessness brings discredit to Washington, MAGA malfeasance debases Colorado.