Trump administration dismantles critical ocean-floor observation network
The Trump administration is dismantling a $370 million ocean-floor observatory network installed a decade ago to collect critical climate data on coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and powerful global ocean currents.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it will begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments this June. The decommissioning will pull monitoring hardware from the waters of Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and a critical region between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) began full operations in 2016. The monitoring system was engineered to provide continuous, real-time climate data to global researchers for 25 years.
Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the initiative, described the network as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.”
The closure of this climate data network follows policy blueprints laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation. The shutdown was recommended in their Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document – a 900-page document designed specifically to act as a policy blueprint the Trump presidency.
In 2024, Project 2025’s authors explicitly targeted the network, claiming the OOI was “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and advising that “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Since taking office, Trump’s administration has consistently targeted the network’s budget, and proposed 80% funding cuts in both 2025 and 2026. While Congress successfully pushed back on both occasions to restore the necessary money, the NSF moved ahead with decommissioning, despite managers previously attempting to save the network by limiting data collection to cut costs.
