For about a decade, hundreds of deep-sea buoys off America’s coasts have been monitoring the conditions of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The streams of publicly available data they produce inform weather reports, generate valuable information about the planet’s changing climate and help the maritime industry and even the military maneuver the high seas.
Yet earlier this month, the Trump administration tried to decommission much of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a blatant attempt to deprive everyone from scientists to disaster planners of vital real-time information.
In a decisive win against the administration’s anti-science agenda, the U.S. Senate this past week passed by unanimous consent blocking the government from dismantling the initiative and its buoys, according to The New York Times. Washington’s U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray provided two of the loudest voices standing up for this critical system.
Congress must continue to push back on efforts to defund and delegitimize the government’s scientific endeavors, including proposed cuts to Northwest U.S. Forest Service research labs, mass firings of the National Science Board and more.
Trump’s plans aren’t a surprise. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a road map of policy for the president’s second term, called for gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — a prospect this editorial board warned about. The project described NOAA as “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Nonsense. And tearing out the country’s best-ever continuous source of oceanic data is to put a blindfold on researchers, mariners, emergency managers and others in a precarious and warming world.
It’s also extremely wasteful. To trash the National Science Foundation’s $368 million investment that created the Ocean Observatories Initiative in the first place is an irresponsible waste of taxpayer money.
Despite all that, the administration appeared last week to be backpedaling on its plan to eliminate much of the initiative, The New York Times also reported. Hopefully, the reason is a recognition that eliminating the country’s oceanic data backbone could endanger coastal communities, including in Washington state.
