Trump Administration Invests in Removing Ocean Research Buoys

American mariners perform annual maintenance at the Station Papa array in the North Pacific, one of seven cabled sites that will be removed early (WHOI / Dee Emrich file image)

Moving the objectives of Project 2025 one step closer to completion, the National Science Foundation is removing 900 ocean data collecting buoys that cost $370 million to install. If left in place, the buoys would have continued to provide climate-related data to scientific researchers for another 15 years - an outcome that NSF's plan will prevent, saving taxpayers nearly $50 million per year. The Coastal Endurance Array off the Pacific Northwest is the first to go, and removal operations at that site are already in process.

Instead of abandoning the buoys in place and defunding their operations, NSF will allocate ship-days to physically remove the Ocean Observatories Initiative's equipment from far-flung locations around the globe, from the North Pacific to Greenland to the Southern Ocean.

"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. 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," said Jim Edson, the head scientist for the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative in a statement.

The initiative to cease collection of climate-related ocean data coincidentally aligns with plans advocated by Thomas F. Gilman, a former automotive industry executive and former Trump administration official who wrote the Department of Commerce section of Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership." In 2024, Gilman advised that the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) is "the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded," and its "operations should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat."

This vision has been partially realized over the course of the administration's first year. NOAA shed about 20 percent of its workforce through layoffs in the first 12 months, with cuts concentrated at OAR. The administration's first budget, written by Project 2025 co-author and current White House Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, would have left OAR "eliminated as a line office," ended OAR's 16 scientific cooperation agreements with 80 different research universities, and folded the rest of its work into other departments. Congress declined to enact all of this proposal and the office remains an independent entity.