Congress Fights to Save America's Ocean Monitoring Network

A bipartisan group of senators sent a formal letter to the National Science Foundation on June 15, 2026, demanding it stop plans to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a $386 million network of instruments and sensors spread across the ocean that has been the backbone of U.S. ocean research according to AP News.

The senators leading the push are Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. The network they're fighting to protect uses a combination of seafloor sensors, anchored buoys, and robotic gliders to collect constant data on ocean temperature, chemistry, biology, and geological activity. The most visible piece is a cabled array off the Pacific Northwest coast. Together, these tools produce streams of information that scientists rely on for climate forecasts, earthquake risk assessment, and countless other studies. The NSF originally awarded the contract to build it — worth $220 million — to a consortium led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, per a 2023 NSF announcement. Running the network costs about $47.76 million per year.

The immediate reason for Congress stepping in is simple: the NSF is planning to start dismantling parts of it. Under the Trump administration's broader push to cut science spending, the agency has already scheduled the removal of at least one major buoy — a 80-meter moored platform that monitors coastal waters — scheduled for removal in June 2026, as reported in early June. The senators' letter is a direct response.

Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem

Ocean monitoring infrastructure this large cannot simply be replaced. Building these systems takes years of engineering work, careful testing, and calibration before scientists can trust the data coming out. And here's the crucial part: gaps in long-running data records are permanent. You cannot go back and fill them in later. The continuous measurements the OOI collects are valuable precisely because they are continuous.

The network's Pacific cabled array also serves a second critical purpose. It is the backbone of a newer project called the Cascadia Offshore Subduction Zone Observatory, an NSF-funded effort announced in September 2023 to better understand earthquake and tsunami risk along the Cascadia subduction zone — one of the highest-hazard seismic zones in North America. Shutting down the cabled array would not just end ocean chemistry monitoring; it would dismantle real-time earthquake and ground-movement sensors that help warn of tsunami danger.

Even more puzzling: the NSF formally committed to operating the network through 2029 just two years ago. In March 2024, the agency published a solicitation to fund a Facility Board to oversee the OOI, budgeted at $700,000 per year for five years. The 2026 presidential budget request also listed OOI operations as a funded line item. The shift toward dismantling has been sudden.

How Congress Might Actually Stop This

The bipartisan nature of the push is significant. Murkowski chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee's Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies subcommittee, which directly controls research spending. Merkley is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Together, they have real leverage over NSF's budget — not just the power to complain, but the authority to attach conditions to funding.

But leverage is not the same as guarantee. Congressional demands to agencies can be enforced through budget riders (specific conditions attached to spending bills) or reprogramming restrictions, but the NSF has considerable freedom in how it allocates money within an already-approved budget. If the FY 2026 funding law does not include language specifically protecting OOI assets, the agency can legally choose to use operations money elsewhere. The Trump administration has shown willingness to push agency discretion in that direction across science departments.

The underlying tension here is structural. Large research infrastructure built over decades — requiring billions to develop — exists within annual budget cycles controlled by shifting political priorities. The OOI costs more to operate each year than the entire budget of many smaller federal science programs, making it both invaluable to scientists and an obvious target when budget cuts arrive. The real race now is whether Congress can pass protective language before the NSF removes more equipment. Even losing a single major mooring means losing years of data continuity — years that took decades to accumulate in the first place.