Trump's Attack on Science

Trump is ripping up $368 million worth of ocean sensors to blind America to climate change and the collapse of the Atlantic current. Congress funded it. Scientists built it. Trump is tearing it up anyway.

The Trump administration is sending ships out in June to physically remove more than 900 deep-sea instruments from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that monitor things like ocean acidity and temperature — dismantling a $368 million monitoring network that took a decade to build and was designed to operate for 25 years.

It will be gone in 15 months.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is not redundant government bloat. It is the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observation system — monitoring greenhouse gas absorption, marine heat waves, commercial fisheries, coastal flooding along the East Coast, and most critically, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, the massive global conveyor belt of water that some scientists fear is weakening due to climate change. A collapse of that current would trigger severe weather catastrophes across multiple continents.

The instruments measuring that current are anchored 9,200 feet below the surface of the Irminger Sea, between Greenland and Iceland, as part of an international scientific collaboration. They are now being pulled out of the water.

The Trump administration tried to cut the network's funding by 80 percent — twice. Congress restored the money both times. So, the administration is simply dismantling it anyway.

The annual operating cost was $48 million. That's less than four days of the Iran war. It's a rounding error on the $1.776 billion slush fund Trump created for his January 6th allies. It's less than half what Trump is spending to gold-plate four horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial. "By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership," said Craig McLean, former acting chief scientist at NOAA.

Scientists warn that decades of institutional knowledge and engineering expertise will be lost — the kind that can't be reconstructed from notes. Commercial fishing industries along the Pacific Northwest and East Coast will lose critical data. Coastal communities will lose flood prediction tools. The entire planet will lose visibility into one of the most consequential ocean systems on Earth.

The National Science Foundation called this decision "nimbler prioritization." Scientists call it what it is: willful blindness to climate catastrophe, funded by your tax dollars and executed against the explicit wishes of Congress.

Please write your senators and representatives to urge them to stop the Trump administration’s foolish and ignorant attacks on climate science, and please like and share this post everywhere to spread the news of this catastrophic assault on environmental information.