Science is distributed. Lots of researchers at lots of different institutions research overlapping topics. That's part of its strength. In the U.S. most basic research is funded by federal grants. And as a results you'll find that research in pretty much any science area you can imagine is funded by federal grants going to multiple different institutions. In this case you're confusing things by bringing in NOAA which is a government agency (part of the Dept of Commerce). NCAR is a non-profit organization and competes for federal grant dollars with researchers at many other institutions (mostly universities). So in that sense there is a strong parallel here to Trump wanting to shut down Harvard (another non-profit organizations at which many different researchers work) and someone saying "doesn't Stanford do research on similar topics?" Yes, there is some conceptual overlap, but in detail there is not. The bigger difference is that Harvard has a big endowment and so can survive (at some level) if the federal grants it has been getting stop flowing. NCAR can't. Also, NCAR happens to have the experts and equipment (supercomputers) to do research that few other organizations can (none really in the U.S.). Harvard probably can't lay claim to that except in very narrow niches....

For perspective the annual budget for NCAR is about half the amount being spend on the new White House ballroom.