Trump Administration Moves 900 Buoys in Trump Ocean Monitoring Dismantling
The National Science Foundation has begun the trump ocean monitoring dismantling by removing 900 ocean data collecting buoys, starting with the Coastal Endurance Array off the Pacific Northwest on Jun 1, 2026. The work starts at a network that cost more than $370 million to install and was expected to keep producing climate-related data for another 15 years.
The agency says the plan will save taxpayers nearly $50 million per year. For researchers who used the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the removal closes off a data stream that supported ocean science across multiple regions, from the North Pacific to Greenland to the Southern Ocean.
Coastal Endurance Array first
Removal operations at the Coastal Endurance Array are already in process. NSF will allocate ship-days to physically remove the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s equipment from locations around the globe, beginning off the Pacific Northwest before moving to other sites.
The scale is striking because the equipment was built for long-running observation rather than short-term fieldwork. Left in place, it would have continued to provide climate-related data to scientific researchers for another 15 years, a window now being cut off as the dismantling proceeds.
Jim Edson on OOI legacy
Jim Edson, the head scientist for the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative, said, “Over more than a decade, OOI has delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems, supporting science, engineering, education, and workforce development across the ocean sciences community.”
Edson also said, “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students, and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”
That legacy now depends on a large physical retrieval effort. NSF plans to remove equipment from the North Pacific, Greenland, and the Southern Ocean, turning a distributed observing network into a recovery operation with one site already under way.
Project 2025 and NOAA
The move aligns with the priorities of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” In 2024, Project 2025 authors said the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research was “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Russell Vought, the White House Office of Management and Budget director and a Project 2025 co-author, wrote an administration budget proposal that would have eliminated the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as a line office and ended its 16 scientific cooperation agreements with 80 different research universities. Congress declined to enact that proposal and funded OAR at $630 million for FY2026.
NOAA shed about 20 percent of its workforce through layoffs in the first 12 months of the administration, with cuts concentrated at OAR. The buoys being removed now were part of the broader climate-observing infrastructure that critics of the administration had argued should remain in place, while the administration’s spending plans and staffing cuts moved in the opposite direction.
For scientists and institutions that depended on OOI data, the immediate consequence is practical: the buoys are being taken out of service now, and the observing network is shifting from collection to removal. The next step is the continued retrieval of equipment from additional global locations as NSF allocates ship-days for the work already underway.
