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Feds Failing In Bid To Take A Supercomputer From A Climate Research Center

The National Center For Atmospheric Research Won’t Be Losing Its Supercomputer.

— John Timmer | June 2, 2026

The Nationa Center For Atmospheric Research Mesa Lab is seen in Boulder, Colorado, on July 7, 2025. Credit: Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images

In December, the Trump Administration abruptly announced it would shut down the National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a Boulder, Colorado-based facility that helps researchers perform studies of weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and more. The news came as a shock, given that the government had never identified serious deficiencies in the management of NCAR and its associated supercomputing center in Wyoming.

Nevertheless, the government ordered the University Consortium For Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation, to help it prepare to transfer the Wyoming Facility to a different operator. UCAR Sued the Government and, on Monday, won a preliminary injunction that places the transfer of the facility on hold.

Is That Your Final Decision?

NCAR is what is termed a “Federally-Funded Research and Development Center” meant to support researchers in the academic community. Rather than having its own research agenda, it provides facilities, equipment, and expertise to support projects that are too large or complex for researchers to pursue on their own. NCAR has been around since the early 1960s and has become a critical resource for the global atmospheric science community.

So, it was a shock for many that the government would attempt to shut it down and distribute the resources it maintains, such as research aircraft and the supercomputing center. The government solicited public feedback on that decision, but UCAR took no chances and sued. As part of that suit, UCAR sought a preliminary injunction that would put the transfer of its supercomputing center on hold.

To get that injunction, UCAR would have to show that it was likely to prevail and that it would experience irreparable harm if the court didn’t intervene.

The Judge in this case, Brooke Jackson, ruled that the issue was one his court could address based on the Administrative Procedures Act. The government had argued that no decision had been made, and therefore that there were no grounds for the suit. But Jackson noted that as early as February—before the public comment period on the decision had even closed—government officials were telling UCAR that “[the National Science Foundation] has decided to transfer stewardship” of the supercomputing center.

By early March, a government program director was telling UCAR that he needed to “Get This Done Quickly” and that documentation of the supercomputing center needed to be handed over “Yesterday.” Even now, months after the deadline for public feedback on the decision, the government admits it hasn’t fully evaluated the comments it received. “The sequence of events strongly suggests that the outcome was predetermined,” the decision notes.

For all of those reasons, he concluded that the NSF had already reached a final decision on the transfer of the supercomputing center, and that decision was subject to review under the Administrative Procedures Act, which is what the rest of the case hinged on.

Blocked

As in so many other cases that have made their way into the courts, the government does not seem to have been prepared to offer much of a defense of its actions. The Administrative Procedures Act prohibits actions that are “Arbitrary and Capricious,” and Jackson found that there was a “failure to articulate any rationale” for the decision to relieve UCAR of its management role.

He noted that some internal documents introduced as evidence indicated that there was dissatisfaction with NCAR’s pursuit of climate research and hosting of scientific programs intended to improve minority participation. But the government chose not to use those as arguments, so the court didn’t need to evaluate them. UCAR, in contrast, introduced significant evidence that the decision to harm NCAR was part of a range of measures meant to pressure Colorado’s Democratic Governor about an unrelated matter.

Given that, the court concluded that forcing UCAR to give up its supercomputing center was arbitrary and capricious, and thus violated the Administrative Procedures Act.

UCAR was also able to demonstrate that it was suffering irreparable harm due to the uncertainty about its future. It has experienced unusually high levels of attrition among its staff, who have a rare set of technical skills and require additional training after hiring. And it expects it will be difficult to find replacements for them.

Given those circumstances, Jackson has issued an injunction blocking the government from forcing NCAR or UCAR to give up any resources related to the supercomputing center.

There are still additional threats to NCAR, including breaking it up, transferring other resources, and even selling its Boulder headquarters. So, this victory is far from the end of the threats. But the legal issues that decided the case are likely to apply to the additional threats, unless the government has a defense that it simply chose not to present here.

— John Timmer is Ars Technica's Science Editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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The Oldest Bar in Every U.S. State (Including the Tavern Frequented by Abraham Lincoln)

Some existed even before the country did.

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Stalin’s Secret Wine Cellar of 40,000 Bottles Unsealed For First Time

Some of The Bottles Date Back To The Early 1800s And Once Belonged To Tsar Alexander III

— Lucy Papachristou | Friday 29 May 2026

Georgia's Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze attends the opening ceremony of a wine cellar housing a collection of rarities from the 19th and 20th centuries, once owned by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (Reuters)

Deep within a vault, where tangled cobwebs cling to the ceiling and a musky sweetness hangs in the air, a remarkable wine collection once owned by Josef Stalin has been unsealed for the first time this week.

The Georgian government, now the custodian of this extraordinary repository in Tbilisi, plans to auction off the roughly 40,000 French and Georgian rarities.

Some bottles in the collection date back to the early 19th century.

Proceeds from the sale are earmarked to establish a new wine education school in Georgia.

Irakli Gilauri, owner of Gilauri Wines, who collaborated with the country's agriculture ministry on the initiative, said that the auction would help to "put Georgia on the collectors' map".

The South Caucasus country sells itself as the birthplace of wine, with archaeological evidence demonstrating a continuous wine-making tradition stretching back 8,000 years.

Some of the bottles were once owned by Tsar Nicholas (Reuters)

Mr Stalin was born to a poor Georgian family in Gori, a city in the country’s east.

He went on to join the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and assumed the leadership after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924.

Mr Stalin then led the Soviet Union for more than 30 years, until his death in 1953.

He was an enthusiastic wine drinker and collector and his trove includes wine from Bordeaux's most famous estates that were once owned by Russia's Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II.

There are 40,000 bottles in the cellar (Reuters)

The Soviets seized the Imperial Romanov collection after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and Mr Stalin became its guardian, slowly adding his favourite Georgian varieties.

Peering into the dust-covered bottles at the amber liquid inside, collector Victor Chen, who travelled to Tbilisi from Dallas, Texas, was excited by what he saw.

"I feel like you're Indiana Jones opening up a cave: it could be nothing, it could be something," he said, referring to the fictional swashbuckling archaeologist from the film franchise.

"There's not many things that are still historical moments at this point. And this could be one of them."

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The Overtoun Bridge In Scotland Has Seen Hundreds of Dogs Leap From The Same Parapet Since the 1950s, Often On Clear Days From The Right Side, And One Behavioural Investigation Pointed To The Scent of Mink Below

The Overtoun Bridge Sits Above Overtoun Burn In Milton, Near Dumbarton, A Victorian Arched Span of Red Sandstone Reached By A Tree-Lined Drive That Ends At A Small Baronial House.

— By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial Process | May 30, 2026

The Overtoun Bridge sits above Overtoun Burn in Milton, near Dumbarton, a Victorian arched span of red sandstone reached by a tree-lined drive that ends at a small baronial house. It is a handsome structure, built for a grand approach. It is also a place where, over several decades, hundreds of dogs have leapt from the same few feet of parapet onto the rocks below.

The leaps almost always happen on clear, dry days. Almost always from the last stones of the right-hand side as you walk away from Overtoun House. Almost always by long-nosed breeds, the collies, labradors, retrievers and spaniels whose olfactory machinery is built for following a thread of scent through a hedge.

For a long time, nobody could say why.

A Bridge With A Body Count

The parapet is solid stone, waist-high on a person, and from the footpath a dog cannot see over it. To a dog walking across, the bridge feels like a corridor with high walls.

What the dog can do, and the human cannot, is smell what is happening below.

Local accounts of dogs jumping go back decades. The story attracted serious attention in the early 2000s when residents and the Scottish SPCA began counting incidents. Estimates vary, but the running tally repeated in Scottish press coverage and in interviews with locals includes hundreds of jumps, with dozens of fatalities, the rest surviving the fall onto the rocks and shallow water below.

Survivors sometimes climb back up and try to jump again. That detail, more than anything else, is what convinced investigators that something specific was pulling the animals over.

Enter David Sands

The Scottish SPCA commissioned David Sands, an animal behaviourist, to work out what was happening. Sands started by ruling things out. He looked at the ghost stories, the suggestion that Overtoun House and its grounds were haunted, and set them aside. He looked at the idea, popular in tabloid coverage, that the dogs were depressed or suicidal, and set that aside too. Dogs do not form the abstract intention to end their lives. The assumption that they might is a projection, the kind of humanising reflex that turns an animal’s behaviour into a human narrative.

He looked at the bridge instead. The weather on the days when jumps occurred. The breeds involved. The exact spot on the parapet. The conditions underneath.

The Pattern In The Data

The clustering was striking. Jumps happened on dry, clear days. They happened almost exclusively from the right side of the bridge looking away from the house, within the last two parapet stones before the end of the span. And they overwhelmingly involved long-snouted breeds with the densest olfactory hardware.

Dogs experience the world primarily through smell. They have around 300 million olfactory receptors compared with roughly six million in humans, and a dedicated vomeronasal organ for parsing the chemistry of other animals. As one recent review put it, scent is how dogs largely experience the world, the way humans rely on sight. Trained scent dogs can pick up target odours from impressive distances, in some controlled tests more than a kilometre away.

So Sands went looking for what, exactly, was being smelled.

The Mink In The Stones

Underneath the right-hand end of the parapet, in the dense vegetation and rock crevices that drop down toward Overtoun Burn, Sands and his team found evidence of small mammals living in the structure. Mice. Squirrels. And American mink, an introduced species that had spread across Scottish waterways.

Mink produce a strong, musky anal secretion used for territorial marking. It is one of the most pungent scents in the British mammalian fauna, instantly interesting to a predator-descended nose.

Sands ran a test with a group of dogs, presenting them with three scents: mink, squirrel and mouse. The majority went straight to the mink and showed strong investigative behaviour. The other two drew much weaker responses.

Combine that with the geometry of the bridge. A long-nosed dog walking across on a dry day catches a thread of mink scent rising up the stonework. The parapet blocks visual information. The dog cannot see that there is a drop on the other side. It can only smell that something extremely interesting is right there, just over the wall. It jumps the way it would jump a garden fence to chase a rabbit.

The breed bias fits. Brachycephalic breeds, the pugs and bulldogs with compressed snouts, have a fraction of the scent-receptor surface area of a collie or a labrador and are less likely to register a faint mammalian musk drifting up from a crevice. Across the wider animal kingdom, scent sensitivity varies enormously by anatomy, and biologists have long debated which species sits at the top of the olfactory league table. The weather bias fits the chemistry. Volatile compounds disperse in dry, still air; rain scrubs them out. On a wet Scottish afternoon, the mink scent never makes it up to nose height. On a dry one, it climbs the sandstone like smoke up a chimney.

What The Jumping Actually Looks Like

Owners who have witnessed it describe the same sequence. The dog is walking normally, often off the lead. It reaches the end of the bridge. Its body language changes, the tail goes up, the head lifts, the nose works. It moves toward the parapet with sudden intent. It does not hesitate at the wall. It scales the stones in a single motion and is gone.

The behaviour is not despair. It is the same focused, almost trance-like pursuit a dog shows when it locks onto a squirrel in a tree. Olfactory cues can trigger powerful approach behaviours in dogs, overriding caution about terrain that the animal has not actually surveyed. The bridge weaponises that override.

The Other Complication

Sands has been careful not to claim mink scent explains every single incident. Some of the dogs involved over the decades may have fallen rather than jumped, chasing real prey across the parapet edge. Some accounts have been retold and inflated. Counting dog jumps from a Victorian bridge is not a tidy dataset.

Researchers who work on animal behaviour have spent the last two decades trying to tighten methods against observer bias, recognising how easily a vivid hypothesis shapes the interpretation of what an animal is doing. The Overtoun investigation lives in that tension. The scent explanation is the strongest one available, supported by the breed pattern, the weather pattern, the location pattern, and the presence of mink in the structure. It is not a controlled experiment.

What Still Happens At The Bridge

After the Sands report, signs were put up at both ends of the bridge warning owners to keep dogs on leads. The signs are still there, weathered, in plain English.

They have not closed the case. Dogs still jump from Overtoun Bridge. The incidents are less frequent than they once were, in part because owners who know the story now leash their animals before they cross. But every few years another collie or labrador goes over the same right-hand parapet on another clear, dry afternoon, and another household learns that the warning sign was meant for them. The mink are still in the stonework. The geometry of the bridge has not changed. The dogs that walk across it on a dry day are still walking into the same trap their predecessors fell into in the 1950s, and a sign in plain English, addressed to humans, is the only thing standing between them and the rocks below.

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Here Are The 50 Best Pizzerias In America For 2026, Ranked! Could Anyone Dethrone Una Pizza Napoletana?

— By Jeremy Repanich | Robb Report | May 31, 2026

The pizza king’s crown remains firmly planted on his head.

For the fifth straight year Anthony Mangieri’s Una Pizza Napoletana in New York City was named the best pizzeria in America by the 50 Top Pizza organization in a ceremony in Manhattan Wednesday night. Los Angeles‘s Pizzeria Sei by William Joo remained ranked at No. 2, but this year shares the position with Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco. At No. 3, Dan Richer’s legendary Jersey City, N.J. restaurant Razza shot up from 12th place last year; Jay’s in Kenmore earned fourth position; and New York City’s Ribalta rounded out the top five for 2026.

Since reopening Una Pizza in 2018, Mangieri has continued his monk-like devotion to making every pizza produced at the restaurant. Using naturally leavened dough and cooking his pies in a custom wood-fired oven imported from Naples, Mangieri has become a standard bearer for the craft of pizza in America. Sei’s approach on the other coast is a bit more experimental than Mangieri, playing with doughs, preparations, and toppings—a nod to his previous time working in fine dining. And Joo is moving Sei to a new destination in West L.A. within the month, allowing his menu to be even more ambitious than what he’s making of of his small restaurant in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. The pizza joint tied with Sei, Tony’s in San Francisco, has long been ambitious as one of the American pioneers of the rising art of the pizza tasting menu.

Dan Richer’s legendary Razza shot up into the top three this year. Evan Sung

For those looking for the single best pizza of the year, the organization says you should head to Orange County and hit up Truly Pizza in Dana Point, Calif. to try its Umami Mushroom pie. This offering has a creamy onion and garlic sauce, smoked mozzarella, marinated roasted mushrooms, toasted sesame oil, sesame seeds, green onion, and bonito flakes. And in another of the night’s ancillary awards, Pizzamaker of the Year was handed to Marisol Doyle, whose Leña in Cleveland, Miss. rose from No. 38 in 2025 to No. 9 this year.

The organization behind the annual rankings, 50 Top Pizza, began in 2014 when a trio of Italians—Barbara Guerra, Luciano Pignataro, and Albert Sapere—wanted to shine a light on exceptional pies. In 2017, they released their first guide, and now the rankings are determined by surveys and in-person visits to pizzerias. The group has expanded to cover multiple regions like World’s 50 Best does with restaurants and started evaluating American pizzerias in 2021, ranking Una Pizza Napoletana No. 1 every year since 2022. Here is the complete list of America’s best pizzerias for the year.

The 50 Best Pizzerias In America For 2026

50. Lucky Dough Pizza, Pensacola, Fla.

49. Quattro, Boston

48. Nostrana, Portland, Ore.

47. Si Cara, Cambridge, Mass.

46. Hapa Pizza, Beaverton, Ore.

45. Lincoln Winebar, Mount Vernon, Iowa

44. Angeli’s Pizzeria, Baltimore

43. Coda di Volpe, Chicago

42. Pizza Baby, Charlotte, N.C.

41. Penelope Pizza, Tucson, Ariz.

40. Pizzeria Florian, East Aurora, N.Y.

39. Pasquale Jones, New York City

38. Tribute Pizza, San Diego

37. A Modo Mio, Arlington, Va.

36. Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, New York City

35. Posto, Somerville, Mass.

34. Zeneli, New Haven, Conn.

33. Antico Pizza, Atlanta

32. Salsa, New York City

31. Bricco, Haddon Township, N.J.

30. Sho Pizza Bar, Nashville

29. Craft 64, Scottsdale, Ariz.

28. Coals, Louisville, Ky.

27. Pizza Delicous, New Orleans

26. Grana, Portland, Ore.

25. Nardò, Huntington Beach, Calif.

24. Fabrica Pizza, Tampa, Fla.

23. Il Forno, San Antonio, Tex.

22. Flour House, San Luis Obispo, Calif.

21. Kesté, New York City

20. Inferno Pizzeria Napoletana, Darnestown, Md.

19. MPN Mission Pizza Napoletana, Winston-Salem, N.C.

18. Partenope Ristorante, Dallas

17. Ops, New York City

16. Pizzeria Beddia, Philadelphia

15. Pizza Secret, New York City

15. Pasquale’s, South Kingstown, R.I.

14. Audace, New York City

13. Stretch Pizza, New York City

12. Valentina’s, Madison, Ala.

11. ‘O Munaciello, Miami

11. La Leggenda, Miami

10. Ken’s Artisan Pizza, Portland, Ore.

9. Leña, Cleveland, Miss.

8. Robert’s, Chicago

8. Ribalta, New York City

7. Jay’s, Kenmore, N.Y.

6. Don Antonio, New York City

5. Francesco Martucci, Miami

4. Truly Pizza, Dana Point, Calif.

3. Razza, Jersey City, N.J.

2. Tony’s Pizza Napoletana

2. Pizzeria Sei, Los Angeles

1. Una Pizza Napoletana, New York City

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Green Card Update: DHS Says ‘Return Home’ Order Won’t Apply To All

— May 30, 2026 | Newsweek | By Sam Stevenson

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has clarified a controversial immigration policy issued last week, saying most green card applicants will not be required to leave the United States while their cases are processed.

Officials said guidance announced in a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) news release—which suggested applicants would have to return to their home countries except in “extraordinary” cases—was not a sweeping policy shift. Instead, DHS now says the decision will remain discretionary, assessed case by case by immigration officers.

“This was just a reminder to officers of their discretionary authority, which has always existed on a case-by-case basis,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement reported by The New York Times.

The clarification follows confusion and backlash from applicants, attorneys, and business groups concerned about disruptions to long-standing immigration processes.

Applicants may still be asked to leave the U.S. depending on individual circumstances, but most will continue applying from within the country under officer discretion.

Washington, DC, USA — September, 16, 2019: Letter from USCIS and left hand on flag of USA background, Stock Image. Inset: New York, USA — October 5, 2016: A Homeland Security Vehicle late in the day in Lower Manhattan. Stock image | Getty Images

Key Points:

DHS says most green card applicants will not need to leave the U.S. despite last week’s announcement

Officials describe the update as a “clarification,” not a major new policy shift

Immigration officers will decide on a case-by-case basis whether applicants must return home

Confusion remains over who could be affected, with details still limited

Attorneys say some applicants are already being asked new questions during interviews

Newsweek has reached out to DHS for comment via email.

Why It Matters

For decades, many immigrants have relied on “adjustment of status,” which allows them to apply for permanent residency without leaving the U.S. That pathway was cast into doubt last week, triggering concern across the immigration system.

This is significant because family-based applicants—who make up the largest share of green cards—often rely on applying from inside the U.S.

Source: The Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics

DHS Calls It A Clarification

DHS said Friday the earlier announcement was not a major policy change but a restatement of existing authority. Officers have long been allowed to require applicants to complete the process abroad on a case-by-case basis.

That framing marks a clear shift from last week’s USCIS release, which described applying from within the U.S. as an “extraordinary” exception.

Despite the update, DHS has not defined when applicants might be required to leave, leaving decisions largely to individual officers.

Officials suggested some groups—such as visa overstays or individuals from countries with higher public assistance use—could face more scrutiny, though no firm criteria have been set.

Mixed Signals Fuel Confusion

Confusion has spread across the immigration system, with uneven reports about how the policy is being applied.

Immigration attorneys, speaking to Newsweek earlier this week, said applicants are already seeing mixed experiences: Elissa Taub of Siskind Susser reported “conflicting” accounts of how the policy is applied, while Angelo Paparelli of Vialto Law said some applicants are being asked why they did not apply from abroad instead of pursuing adjustment of status.

That uneven rollout is making it harder for lawyers to advise clients and assess potential legal challenges

Green cards are concentrated among a relatively small group of countries, meaning any changes could hit some nationalities far more than others.

Source: The Department of Homeland Security Office of Homeland Security Statistics

What Happens Next

Critics say the administration is trying to contain backlash from last week’s announcement.

Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the uncertainty could complicate any legal challenge.

“It does make it more difficult to figure out what you’re suing for when you don’t know what this thing really is,” he added.

Viewed globally, that concentration becomes even clearer, with a handful of countries accounting for a disproportionate share of recipients.

Top 10 Countries Obtaining Most Green Cards

Source: Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Latest Data From 2023

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The Diplomatic Dust on Instagram: "Mehdi Hasan shares a heartfelt story about an Uber driver in London who burst into tears when asked about

45K likes, 559 comments - thediplomaticdust on December 19, 2025: "Mehdi Hasan shares a heartfelt story about an Uber driver in London who b

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Judge Orders President’s Name Off Kennedy Center, And He Reacts With Fury

U.S. District Judge Casey Cooper said “it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so”

— The New York Times | May 29,2026

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A federal judge ordered on Friday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remove

President Trump's name from the building's facade and all official branding and temporarily blocked the institution from shuttering this summer for renovations.

Mr. Trump railed against the judge's ruling in an incensed social media post, suggesting that he was considering casting the Kennedy Center aside as one of his personal projects. The president wrote that unless he was free to decide the center's trajectory, he had "no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey."

"Unfortunately, Judge Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life," he wrote.

Judge Christopher R. Cooper, of the Federal District Court in Washington, determined that the board's decision to add Mr. Trump's name to the Kennedy Center violated a law passed by Congress in 1964 that made "crystal clear" the institution was to be named for Former President John F. Kennedy.

"Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it," the judge wrote in a 94-page opinion. He ordered that the 18 letters added to the center's front portico be removed within two weeks.

The center's board of trustees, a vast majority of whom are allies of Mr. Trump, voted in December to add the president's name to the performing arts center. Less than a day later, new lettering was added to the building's marble facade, which now reads: "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts."

Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the center, said that it would appeal the ruling, signing her statement as the "Trump Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations."

"We are confident that on appeal the court will uphold the board's will to recognize President Trump's historic contributions to our nation's cultural center," she said.

The judge's order came in response to a lawsuit by Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, who is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center's board. She objected to both the renaming and the plans to close the institution, which her lawyers argued was in fact a decision "designed to hide their embarrassment about declining ticket sales."

Judge Cooper found that the board had been "derelict" in considering the possible consequences to programming when shuttering the center, as well as its legal responsibility to maintain the center as a memorial to the slain president. His order did not make any specific directives for reinstating programming as the board reassesses its renovation plans.

Workers added President Trump’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in December. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

Ms. Beatty said in a statement celebrating the ruling that "the Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump."

In a parallel ruling in a separate lawsuit on Friday, Judge Cooper, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, stopped short of blocking the center from beginning renovations after preservationist groups said they had been undertaken without the required permits.

While that coalition of groups had argued that the administration appeared intent on remaking the center in Mr. Trump's image, and potentially demolishing the structure entirely, Judge Cooper found that possibility too remote for now. But he warned that he would re-evaluate if the facts on the ground changed, saying there was a "paucity of concrete details as to the project's scope."

"If the work is, say, more transformative than present testimony suggests or requires permits that the center has yet to acknowledge or secure, the court's legal analysis might look substantially different," the judge wrote.

After shunning the Kennedy Center in his first term, Mr. Trump has staged a wholesale takeover of the institution in his second. He stocked the center's board with loyalists, who installed him as chairman, ushering in a period of upheaval as many artists boycotted the increasingly politicized institution.

In Mr. Trump's social media post on Friday, he indicated that he was now interested in giving up responsibility for the Kennedy Center, writing that he had instructed the Commerce Department to "transfer this failing Institution" to Congress. It was not immediately clear what he meant; the programming is run through a nonprofit, but Congress allots federal funds to maintain the building.

Mr. Trump announced in February that the center would be closing in July, calling the building "dilapidated" and in desperate need of renovations. Kennedy Center officials have asserted that it would have been irresponsible to keep the building open while addressing its maintenance needs, which they say includes widespread water damage and corrosion, outdated stage equipment and necessary security updates.

The Kennedy Center's executive director, Matt Floca, defended the decision to shutter the building during testimony in court in the case brought by the preservation groups. Mr. Floca, a facilities professional whom Mr. Trump promoted in March, testified that there were "very clear efficiencies" — including financial - that came with deciding to temporarily close the institution.

But he acknowledged that there had been no studies comparing the cost of construction on a shuttered building with one that remained open.

"There is no need to," Mr. Floca testified.

The board approved the plan in March, but the judge found that it had not done its due diligence in assessing the practical and legal questions surrounding such a major decision. He noted that although Mr. Trump had said in a social media post that there had been a one-year review of the issue involving contractors and "musical experts," there was no evidence that such a review had taken place.

"None of the board members had sufficient information in advance of the March 16 meeting to make a well-considered decision to close the center," the judge wrote.

Judge Cooper noted that his decision did not prevent the center's board from deciding to close the institution for renovations in the future, but he urged it to prepare itself with "sufficient information to make a considered, independent decision, taking account of its obligation to both maintain and operate" the arts venue and "its solemn duty to memorialize a fallen president."

The judge ordered the sides to file an update by June 5, proposing next steps for how to proceed.

In anticipation of the Kennedy Center's closure, its performance calendar has largely been stripped bare. Several Broadway productions that were set for runs at the center were forced to cancel. The National Symphony Orchestra, which is attached to the center, has had to search for other local venues for their performances.

Officials also began laying off staff members, saying that only a bare-bones work force would be retained during the closure.

In her statement, Ms. Daravi, the Kennedy Center spokeswoman, indicated that the center would push forward with what she described as an "urgent and significant restoration."

"With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress," she said, "the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy."

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How Donald Trump Became Jimmy Carter

An Iran Crisis. Inflation. Someone Should Get The President A Cardigan Sweater

— By Matt Bai | May 29, 2026

Illustration By Victor Juhasz

Matt Bai: “No president really wants to be compared to Jimmy Carter (rest his soul), but in Donald Trump’s case, the parallels now are hard to ignore. Carter’s presidency was overtaken by a hostage crisis in Iran, where in 1979 followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized 66 Americans and held them (or most of them, anyway) for more than a year. The impasse played out as a televised drama… and became entwined in the public mind with uncontrolled inflation, interest rates, and gas prices, while Carter pleaded with Americans to turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters instead. All of it signaled that the country was spiraling and the president overmatched.”

“Almost a half century later, Trump stumbled into his own implacable hostage crisis in Iran, this one entirely of his own making. For several weeks, Iran has held the Straight or Hormuz — and, by extension, the global economy — at gunpoint.”

“Chances for permanently ending the standoff seem to fluctuate by the day, as Trump desperately seeks a way out of the conundrum. As I write this, the most likely outcome seems to be a humiliating capitulation on Trump’s part, in which Iran will loosen its grip on the oil in exchange for a bunch of vague talking points about future accomplishments.”

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"It May Be Dangerous To Be America’s Enemy, But To Be America's Friend Is Fatal."

— Hell-bound War Criminal Henry Kissinger

Very Loyal, Brutally Blunt and Honest Former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan Was Illegally Ousted By the Corrupt to Their Cores $$$ Army Generals on the Order of the U.S. President Genocidal Joe!