Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration said it was going to pull hundreds of scientific instruments out of ocean waters near the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, south of Greenland. It was part of the administration’s plan to roll back funding from a multimillion dollar research program dedicated to studying complex ocean and planetary dynamics, including climate change.
Then, last week, it put the brakes on that decision. The National Science Foundation said it would stop dismantling the sensors after a bipartisan group of senators pushed back and passed a measure blocking the agency from doing so. The federal agency also plans to put back the equipment it had already removed.
The attempt to dismantle the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was “supreme stupidity,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who sponsored the measure along with Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican representing Alaska, in a statement. “We’ll keep fighting to ensure scientists, fishermen, and coastal communities can continue to utilize the critical data the OOI provides.”
This is not the first time that outrage and bipartisan support have saved climate-related research from the sweeping cuts enacted by the Trump administration. Sometimes to little fanfare, lawmakers have moved to preserve funding for scientific research at a number of agencies, as well as some environmental programs like Energy Star, which provides consumer rebates for purchasing energy-efficient appliances. Given their success, it’s likely that the administration’s anti-science agenda will continue meeting more backlash.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative had already been protected by lawmakers twice after the Trump administration proposed cutting the majority of its funding in 2025 and 2026 budgets. For now, the program, which began in 2016, is slated to continue operating for at least another decade.
But the initiative is not the only important ocean monitoring effort run by the United States. Researchers say other large cutting-edge ocean and climate research programs are facing a funding cliff with no plans in place to make sure they continue operating.
“We are seriously looking at the possibility of going dark,” said Lynne Talley, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Talley has been one of the scientists helping lead the Argo program, an international effort that has deployed thousands of underwater floats that bob up and down throughout ocean depths equipped with a variety of data-collecting sensors.
Since the first floats were deployed more than 25 years ago, the Argo program has provided scientists with an unprecedented ability to track changes in temperature, salinity, and heat throughout the oceans. Even when scientists use data from other ocean projects, they often combine or check it against data from the Argo program’s floats. A recent addition to the program expanded the network with biogeochemical sensors that measure oxygen, acidity, chlorophyll, and other indicators of ocean health.
This helps scientists piece together the carbon cycle of oceans and how climate change is influencing it. “Those measurements have become essential to understanding the ocean,” Talley said.
The United States has deployed about half of the Argo program’s floats, which are battery powered and need to be replaced about every five years. But stagnant funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency leading the international initiative, means the pace of deployment has been too slow to maintain the program’s full coverage. It’s also on track to run out of funding for the biogeochemical part of the network by the end of this year, with the last floats expected to be deployed this fall and no plan in place to continue that program.
That means the Argo network could fail to remain fully operational in the future, even if other governments, such as the European Union’s, increase their contributions to it. “We have been the leaders in these ocean observations for many decades, and we are losing ground,” Talley said.
Alicia Navidad, National Science Foundation / The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
In the next few years, two other U.S.-led initiatives studying one of the most pressing, and uncertain, climate threats lurking in the ocean could run out of federal funding, too. That threat is known as AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: a massive conveyor belt in the Atlantic Ocean that brings hot water to the north and cold water to the south. The system of currents is responsible for the climate many Europeans know today and is one of the reasons that Quebec experiences far more freezing days a year than London, despite sitting at a similar latitude.
Scientists think that climate change could cause it to slow down or collapse, which would result in dramatic and deadly weather changes in Europe and faster sea level rise along the eastern coast of North America. It has happened in the past, such as during the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.
But for now, a scientific understanding of how likely that is to happen remains elusive. Strong year-to-year changes in ocean currents make it difficult to detect trends in how AMOC might be changing, and scientists remain divided on when and how soon the system might slow down. That makes studying it all the more important, said Susan Lozier, an oceanographer and the dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech University.
Lozier co-leads OSNAP, one of two large research programs dedicated to studying the circulation system. These teams, which include researchers from the U.S. and six other countries, have placed dozens of moorings, outfitted with a variety of scientific instruments, across the North Atlantic, to capture changes in the water. OSNAP, in combination with the other program, RAPID, represent the best shot researchers currently have at getting to the bottom of the AMOC mystery, Lozier said.
But funding for U.S. participation in the projects depends on federal grants, which are on course to run out after next year, Lozier said. “We’re on pins and needles, waiting for what happens after that,” she said.
More than a year has passed since the program’s leaders submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for more funding. So far, Lozier said, they haven’t heard anything definitive. (The National Science Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the meantime, the Trump administration has slashed funding for science across the federal government, often targeting climate-focused research. Funding for geosciences like oceanography has fallen by more than half from last year. “We are really concerned about the possible continuation,” Lozier said. But it was heartening to hear about the reversal of the planned cuts to the OOI program, she said.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative also faced cutbacks in 2018 during Trump’s first term. That time, the downsizing was handled through a deliberate process that involved extensive input from scientists, engineers, and the National Science Board, said Jaime Palter, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, in an email. The savings, she said, were redirected to support other ocean science work.
Commenting before learning that the funding to OOI was restored, Palter said the Trump administration’s recent actions were “fundamentally different” from last time. The speed of the planned dismantling of the initiative wouldn’t have given the scientific community time to adapt, she said.
Now that the decision has been reversed, it feels hopeful to know that people care about studying the ocean enough to push back on funding cuts, Palter said. But, she added, the uncertain future for programs like Argo make it “important not to let down our guard.”
“Destroying those capabilities can happen swiftly,” she said. “Rebuilding would be the work of a generation.”
