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Congressional Daily Record
This section is about changes proposed to a bill or resolution. It mentions members such as John Wright Hickenlooper.
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June 23, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextSA 5994. Mr. HICKENLOOPER (for himself and Mr. Bennet) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill S. 4784, to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2027 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:
At the end of title X, add the following:
SEC. 1094. ASSESSMENT OF NATIONAL SECURITY IMPACTS OF
RESTRUCTURING THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR
ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH.
(a) Findings.—Congress finds the following:
(1) The Department of Defense relies extensively on
foundational atmospheric modeling, predictive analytics, and
basic research of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research (referred to in this section as the “NCAR”) to
support global operational weather forecasting, flight and
satellite safety, and strategic mission planning.
(2) Any disruption to these interconnected capabilities
risks creating critical gaps in environmental intelligence,
degrading the accuracy of severe weather tracking, and
compromising the operational readiness of advanced national
defense platforms on earth and in space.
(b) Report.—
(1) In general.—Not later than 180 days after the date of
enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense, in
consultation with the Administrator of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, shall submit to the
congressional defense committees a report assessing the
national security impacts of a potential dismantling,
restructuring, or divestiture of the capabilities and
infrastructure of the NCAR.
(2) Contents.—The report under paragraph (1) shall
include—
(A) a complete inventory of all current Department of
Defense programs, initiatives, research and development
efforts, and operational workflows that rely on NCAR-
developed models, software frameworks, data streams, or
computational infrastructure;
(B) an operational impact assessment detailing how the loss
or degradation of NCAR's specialized assets, including the
atmospheric research aircraft fleet of the NCAR and the NCAR-
Wyoming Supercomputing Center, would affect flight safety,
long-range deployments, and global operations;
(C) a detailed analysis of the interagency dependencies
involved, specifically evaluating how a disruption to the
NCAR would impact the ability of the Department of Defense to
integrate next-generation satellite observations into
military weather models;
(D) an evaluation of the impacts on national security space
operations and critical defense infrastructure resulting from
any degradation to the solar physics and space weather
forecasting capabilities of the NCAR, with a specific focus
on how disruptions to solar monitoring assets would affect
early-warning timelines for coronal mass ejections,
geomagnetic storms, and solar flares that threaten military
satellite communications, global positioning systems, and
orbital tracking; and
(E) recommendations for mitigation strategies or
legislative safeguards necessary to maintain the
uninterrupted continuity of critical environmental
intelligence and to ensure that any civilian agency
restructuring does not inadvertently compromise national
security capabilities or readiness.