As a physical oceanographer, the destruction of these observing systems is horrific.
It is hard to stress enough how intentionally OMB is trying to disassemble American science. The new (proposed) OMB guidelines prohibit international collaboration without pre approval for example. They also codify a political grant approval process. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/the-office-of-manage...
Additionally, OMB is not releasing the congressional appropriated funds that they are required to. This is currently tanking the post-doctoral researcher market and eventually will wipe out a generation of researchers if it isn’t stopped. https://grant-witness.us/funding_curves_nsf.html
The other thing they've done is make it possible to cancel any grant at any time if it goes against the politics of the current executive administration.
Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing, entire areas of science have flourished that would never have happened otherwise.
That's not to say that politics is completely out of science, Congress has done things like ban any research money for gun safety, for example. But that had to make it through Congress, a vote across party lines, instead of just being the political whim of some bureaucrat that can cancel whatever they want whenever they want.
For every issue you read about here on HN, there are about 10 other policy changes designed to destroy the US's scientific infrastructure. It doesn't get much attention because of all the other chaos going on, and scientists tend to be pretty quiet and try to stay apolitical, but it is truly a full-on crisis in the scientific research community right now. You won't see immediate effects, but in 10-20 years when China zooms ahead of the US on all research fronts and the US is left out of key technology and science directions, we will feel it then.
And the non-cancellable nature of grants is not just a nice-to-have, it's absolutely critical for research with upfront capital costs (buying equipment, building labs, etc.)
The very _fact_ that this is a policy is disrupting research, even if specific grants haven't been cancelled. Some universities are stepping in to backstop, but it's a powerful chilling effect.
People here are missing that they're not dismantling random things. There is a system to it, the objective of which is far more sinister than mere ideology.
The sensors in question here are crucial to monitor the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
They don't want that monitored because it is currently breaking down.
Not some arbitrary far away time, now.
The science of this gets astroturfed into some nonsense "we don't really know". We do.
But conveniently, now the data to show this to the incredulous won't exist.
When did evidence ever change the minds of the incredulous? The whole debate has become so polluted by the forces who want no action on climate change we can’t even use the original description any more.
Some of the specific grants that have been cancelled are shocking in the negative effect they will have on the ecosystem. Cutting off Sean Eddy, a giant in DNA analysis, just baffles the mind:
Understandable, as DNA analysis takes all the fun from raping people without consequences, making it much more inconvenient to hide. Criminals from the entire planet hate DNA analysis with passion. War criminals and sex criminals specially.
A professor I worked for in college was a big fan of how the US funding was fragmented, with some coming from the NSF, some from NIH, Energy Ag, each branch of the military... if one department had a loon in charge, the others would keep things running smoothly.
Yeah, that was one massive benefit of the fragmentation of scientific funding, just like how in the private sector there's a great diversity of funders, of employers, etc. etc. etc.
All that's now been reduced to a single kill switch at the very top, and they're trying to change all the non-political positions into political appointees so that they have control not only with a veto at the top, but control of every single decision along the entire way, without any of that pesky scientific merit getting in the way.
>Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing
Please don't take this as a defense of the Trump administration pulling these ocean sensors, but the previous administration also had political demands on grants. One of the better articles about this I've found is "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge" - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-an...
This ended up getting grants cancelled because they'd throw in a line so the DEI checkbox would get checked, and then Cruz went through with a hacksaw and cancelled the grant for it, as Scott Alexander found - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...
Also famous for being a principal architect and author of Project 2025, which explicitly calls for impoundment as a mechanism for expanding presidential authority to control the Federal budget for political purposes.
In order to usher in their Theocratic Dictatorship, they need to have an un-educated population. This is the start. I hope it takes a few generations and the tide can be turned. But at this rate, the US might end within the next couple years, not decades.
I don't think they are really even trying to hide it. Project 2025 was pretty obvious road map.
It's not even about an uneducated population. It's about preventing research that might be inconvenient politically. Ocean sensors provide evidence of climate change and the current political agenda is to suppress evidence of climate change.
anyone knowing anything is dangerous to fascists. unmoored radicalism does not appreciate competent people.
destroying the professional class and reducing everyone to serfs has been an active ongoing never-closed plot against America that has never been snuffed out, and that is having it's day. the Business Plot people walk among us, and here, 93 years latter, they are getting the hollowing out of the state and any possible upstanding world anchored in anything good that they've worked for. these people, these people, these people.
He’s a self described Christian nationalist. He literally believes the laws should reflect Christian morals and views. Like a right wing sharia. And that’s what Project 2025 includes. Things like age verification for porn are meant to be backdoor porn bans, and also meant to hurt gay and lesbian culture. But it’s based on a puritanical Christian theocratic sort of view.
The elected reps are captured by business interests. Citizens united means the best marketing team wins every election. The reps do not work for citizens, why would they? Voting has been nullified, democracy is dead.
It's borderline evil. The only reason they are doing this is to silence the science that contradicts their agenda.
I get the part about old school corruption where your cronies get to steal from the government (hello Big Coal/Big Oil), but to figuratively shit on the people of the world out of spite takes it to a whole new level...of evil.
If you want to be an authoritarian ruler, truth is the first thing you have to eliminate! If noone knows what is true, a leader can tell you what to believe! Science is our method to determine truth! A führer cannot have that!
More than that if you're a professor (and thus an educator for the next generation) you're now incentivized to modify your speech in favour of the authoritarian in order to keep getting funding.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which funding to these is being cut because climate scientists have historically been politically opposed to certain large republican donors that make their fortunes burning fossil fuels.
The primary goal of authoritarianism is consolidation of power among a small number of elites. Anything that can reduce that power is an enemy.
The essential weakness that the powerful elites have is that they are, by definition, outnumbered. So in order to consolidate and maintain power, they need to disturb any system that the masses can use to coordinate and form collective action.
Reality has a strong consensus-creating effect. We all live in the same material world, so simply by understanding it better and sharing that understanding, we will automatically trend towards having more common ground and more agreement.
That's a threat to elite power, so authoritarian governments have always been anti-science. They may pay it lip service, or attempt to harness it to their own ends, but they never want an entire populace that it well-educated and grounded in reality, because well-informed masses are harder to divide and conquer.
I would point to the consistent consolidation of power upward in our government, from Congress to the President, away from States to Congress, away from local governments to State. Our population grows and yet congress is capped, our problems and cases grow and yet the Supreme Court isn't being increased and instead picks and chooses cases that support the federal government.
I find it hard to believe anyone is willingly ceding power upward except towards the goal of a stronger more authoritarian rule by the elite classes because they don't think lesser people are worthy of making decisions. They don't care about stepping on others as long as they think they will get to do the stepping.
That they're fascist? And project 2025 is essentially a blueprint of what Hitler did by purging the bureaucracy of anyone that might oppose him. The new OMB guidelines extends it to anyone getting grants to do science.
Its clear that Vought, Miller and even Vance are fans of Carl Schmitt as they're implementing his ideas, Vance has even mentioned him publicly.
Pretty much every single part of Project 2025 is designed to reduce America's standing in the world, not just the anti-science parts of it.
It's a general trend across all authoritarian regimes; it's harder to be authoritarian with lots of international connections, with lots of strength and partnerships.
Autarky, authoritarianism, isolation, all go together (along with weak economies, etc., but the goal isn't to have the biggest amount of pie, the goal is to be able to control all the pie slices and take the biggest portion, even if the pie is far smaller.)
Studying the ocean temperatures verifies that climate change is not a hoax. "He" is making money off fossil fuels. That is enough of a reason for being anti-science. This is the same guy that decided that the COVID numbers would go down if we just stopped measuring them. Burying his head in the sand is his go-to solution for all problems.
The steel man is that you can’t peer review your way to breakthroughs that change consensus, because peer review relies on consensus, so peer review has to be made subordinate to accountable decision makers.
I think this is part of an anti-climate change agenda, which is about protecting fossil fuel investments. Not sure that it is broadly anti-science, except maybe in the sense of being against public funding broadly.
Once you start asking what Trump would do differently if he actually were an agent or captive of hostile foreign interests, the rest will begin to make more sense.
There's a lot of collateral damage that could have been avoided if millions weren't being squandered on dubious "science" like studying grooming habits of trans aboriginals in the Central African Republic (a made-up scenario, but there are many like it).
At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.
A lot of this “dubious science” isn’t dubious at all. Rather, people just have a political view on it. Like climate change is considered dubious science by the right. It’s not, but that’s how they view it.
There's nobody gatekeeping what can be studied and what can't. You claim millions are being wasted; by who? Is the goverment funding the studies you deem as wasted? If so you'd think that rather than making up a study you'd be able to give a single example. Should be very easy if millions are being wasted on these what I'd assume you'd call "bogus" studies.
Aren't you in any way concerned that you can't give a real example of the sort of thing you're talking about, and have to make one up? This should be the wake-up call that makes you re-evaluate your priors.
The reality is that reactionaries often describe "useless" scientific endeavors like "condoms for worms" that end up being the only thing stopping parasitic screwworms from infesting the US cattle herd, which will end up costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to resolve- and spike the already-high cost of beef for decades.
There are many made-up scenarios, but not many real examples of what you are using to justify the weakening of the entire nation.
And the fact that you had to fabricate something is literally proof of it. Now, go find any supposed "waste" and you'll find that, again, the science has been completely misrepresented to the public by an anti-science media source that was focused on creating fake propaganda rather than properly informing the public.
Seriously. Prove me wrong, go find all this bath water that you claim exists, post it here!
Give me an example of this supposed phenomenon, because I haven't seen it. And anytime I've heard somebody claim with an actual example, it's been easy to disprove their assertions.
What COVID research shutdowns are you talking about? That's too vague to understand, it could mean anything of any sort of political motivation! But with COVID specifically, there's an entire industry devoted to feeding fake conspiracies, so you'll have to be very specific in order for anybody to agree with you.
The policy of the federal government is anti renewable energy and pro coal, pro oil.
Oil executives are profiting from the situation with Iran. These guys don't want us to have cheap renewable energy. They want us to keep paying their tolls and they don't want anyone to have access to evidence that could continue exposing the damage they've done to the environment.
None of it is under the radar anymore, they have a radicalized supporter base and increasingly dictatorial control over the basic functioning of government. Subtlety is no longer necessary under those conditions.
The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.
Cost has nothing to do with it. This was all laid out in the project 2025 manifesto. Burn it all down with no regard to money previously invested. Makes it harder for future administrations to rebuild. Halting the collection of data is not enough. Maintenance is 5% or less of the cost to deploy new. If they destroy it, it makes the cost to rebuild (including having to re-seek congressional approval) that much harder and time consuming.
The US military budget is 900 billion dollars. The government can afford a few hundred million for some sensors, it should not need private sector patrons
That number, incidentally, is the entire NATO military budget. Which scares me because I can imagine someone planning on taking action that would result in the dissolution of NATO thinking they can make up the difference that way and choosing that number with that in mind.
Is it actually coming out of the military budget? I assumed we were just going to get taxed for it, or they'd pull it from some other places that actually needs the funds.
Alternatively, they could just increase the military budget by 300 billion (or more).
That's only part of it, the US and allies are reportedly going to set up a $300 billion fund for Iran, the particular terms of accessing it aren't clear at this point. GP is correct in that the US is not putting up $300 billion, but it will be putting up part of that money. The US fought and lost a war and Iran comes out ahead, and the US and its allies come out worse and poorer.
Whatever delusions I once held that software engineers are above average intelligence were completely eradicated by seeing how many HN commenters eagerly bought into the obvious lies about DOGE and their goals (amongst other things). It was embarrassing. They sure seem to be a lot quieter about that now, though.
Have to sternly disagree: at least on the conservative side, it is thoroughly lapped up. Right wingers the world over constantly vote to fuck themselves and the rest of us over with this never ending whingeing about debt, spending, pork, what have you. On this particular issue it's even less surprising since the only thing perhaps a right winger wants to hear less about than government spending is climate change.
The entire debt ceiling bullshit is political theatre and always has been. We didn't even have a debt ceiling for the majority of our existence as a nation, and since it's creation by right wingers, it has been used as a bludgeon by right wingers to kneecap anything that stood to benefit the civil good of our country. Austerity politics have been deployed here and elsewhere to great effect to destroy social programs, demonize those who need them, and reallocate trillions of dollars to the private sector to provide the same services the public sector did, but worse, and while enriching greedy assholes the entire way. And the whole way it has been done by an enthusiastic and approving portion of the public who can be persuaded to feel outrage that seventy cents of their yearly taxes are going to some program in some far off part of the country they'll never see.
Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again. And every time we want to do something science and evidence backed like give the homeless somewhere to live, we're met with a chorus of WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR IT, but every goddamn time there's another country full of brown kids to blow the fuck off the face of the Earth, we always, always have money for that.
> Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again.
Exactly. If the people on the right cared at all about government spending they'd never vote republican again, which just shows us that they don't actually care about government spending. They don't seem to want to talk about the things they really do care about too loudly though.
Its not even about saving money. If they just wanted to save money they'd just stop paying attention to the data coming in, retask/lay off the people working on it, and let the buoys stay out there. A dumb idea to me, but at least that's consistent. Let other organizations decide to manage the buoys. While I'd prefer for the government to do it, it could be possible to have other groups fund such things. It would be a lot cheaper, easier, and allow for a smoother transition with no lost data for some other org or government to take over the project.
Instead, we're paying money to pull the sensors out of the water. We're actively spending money to blind ourselves to things we know are growing areas of concern.
But that just seems like par for the course for the current administration, whether it's tariffs or ballrooms or ocean sensors - do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
Well the majority party in Congress could put a stop to it at any time. The fact that they don't, and haven't just on about any related issue, tells you everything you need to know. They just don't want to put their names on it in case public opinion sours, then they can at least try to keep their jobs and claim innocence.
> do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
don't forget that the courts have already decided that anything this president does is legally okay because he's immune from punishment for breaking any law as long as they decide the illegal activity was an "official act".
Congress isn't toothless so I just don't see how I can believe anything but that the majority of congress, whether they claim opposition or not, is onboard with this nonsense. They are completely out of touch and it seems like they are just playing a game of PR hot potato to avoid taking any real action.
This is the strangest part to me. They will spend millions and several years to dismantle a system that, realistically, could also just be abandoned. Not that we should leave more random, unused equipment out in the world, but if this were really about cost savings, and given this administration does not care at all about the environment, then leaving the equipment in place was the best option by their stated rationale.
This administration is extremely wasteful despite the mantra about reducing waste, fraud and abuse. In fact it's done the opposite of all three things.
There's no point in spending taxpayer money understanding what may or may not happen in the future, when we already know what will happen: Jesus is coming back. We need to spend on the military for the final battle of Armageddon.
^ Literally the beliefs of the most influential part of the political base of the administration.
I don't think they literally believe it. They ostensibly espouse this for political purposes, but it doesn't appear they believe in any permanent objective or thing other than their own power and profit.
Political strategy. Step one of controlling a population is to stop information flow; you can't stop something bad happening if you don't know about it. Since the party in charge thinks climate change is a hoax, all efforts at slowing climate change are therefore bad. So you remove the tools people use to document and respond to climate change, and now everything is fixed, in your world view.
The current administration doesn’t care about climate change, or believes it’s a hoax. Given this, they see no need to fund research and data gathering that tells them otherwise.
No, they are attacking any and all forms of data collection that can be connected to climate change - even if it's not specifically for climate change.
This is not true, most people care about climate change, even in the US (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...). Maybe you think "if they care then why are they still driving/flying/eating meat/whatever" and I sympathize, but climate change is not an issue that will be solved by individuals taking responsibility, in the same way that wars still happen even when the vast majority of the population oppose them.
If you're wondering why they don't at least vote for someone who cares about climate change, I don't know. But claiming people don't care at all is not true and is self-defeating, because it makes people who do care think "I guess I'm in the minority, there's no point in trying".
> Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care
We already have them. People just claim they're chance effects with no connection to climate change.
The problem with refuting it is that they are chance events, there's no way to definitively say "this was caused by climate change", because it's always possible it would have happened anyways. It's the upwards trend in frequency and severity that we can definitively point and say "that's caused by climate change", but that's too abstract for most people to understand.
There are massive gaps in our current climate models because we have almost no data about subsurface ocean dynamics. Many of the assumptions about the oceanic environment in climate models were demonstrated to not match empirical measurement a few decades ago but we don't have enough oceanic data to come up with a coherent model for the observed dynamics. Without a plausible model for these dynamics, any predictions made from climate models have a high probability of being significantly incorrect.
These sensor networks were the first step toward collecting some data that would allow us to develop a plausible model for subsurface ocean dynamics. To be clear, we are probably still a couple decades out from this in any case but removing these sensor networks from operation definitely won't help. There are very few efforts to collect this data at scale, I believe this was one of the largest.
Most people don't realize how critical subsurface sensor networks are to building accurate climate models.
Dismantling monitoring programs which show evidence of climate change is one of the Project 2025 priorities.
Specifically, their plan calls for downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025, p. 676), and breaking up NOAA (p. 674), because they view these agencies as a source of "climate alarmism" and that "the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded."
Because it damages USA. As other thousands of nonsensical choices in the last years, America always, consistently, ends scammed milked, and holding the shorter straw. Everything in this government is designed specifically to the inch to humiliate and destroy US. Acting exactly like foreign enemy agents for fun and profit.
Or maybe because it could be used (in theory) to register submarine's position.
Or maybe somebody expects to benefit from the climate change in some way, and couldn't care less if half of the planet became inhabitable in the process. There aren't many other reasonable explanations.
How would you explain it? It seems either entirely ideological on the part of its architects, cynically designed to appeal to a political base that has been inculcated with that ideology, or cynically designed to enrich its architects' political and business allies under cover of appealing to a political base that has been inculcated with that ideology. Possibly some combination of those three. But the core issue is opposition to and misrepresentation of scientific consensus, on the part of an administration that has referred to its political
opponents as "the enemy from within".
it is extremely difficult to do in cases like this. again, why are we pulling the sensors? why not leave them in place and stop paying for maintenance?
why not find alternate funding mechanisms?
because we know who these people are, and what their motives are. they show us time and and time again.
Well. Even if you want to attribute a bad motive that would give more clarity. Maybe the people involved in these projects have expressed disagreement with the admin, so they don’t want to pay them.
What’s so important about these particular sensors that any change in resourcing is a categorical evil?
Because they're Woke sensors that are collecting woke lies about the Chinese Climate Change Hoax of course.
Also Accuweather paid a lot of money for this president and they are very interested in not having the US government compete against them with free, high-quality weather forecasting.
It's in the republican party's interest to ensure there's as little data as possible showing any form of climate anomalies. Their party platform is that climate change is not real, and Trump is personally a big fan of coal power.
It’s to avoid collecting data that would point to major climate change issues. Things like disruption of currents that circulate across oceans. It’s really a dishonest move. We already paid to have this network of sensors, and they’re supposed to run for another 20 years. Instead they will spend 2 years visiting all this infrastructure that we have in place, and pulling it out of the oceans.
Sure, it's to punish Trump's political opponents. That's all there is to it. Liberals politicians tend to support scientific endeavors, Trump wants to punish them.
Don't make it more complicated than it actually is.
For simple minded people like Trump and his followers yes. For the ones pulling his strings they have motives and reasons beyond the idiots they put in as a figurehead.
The countries on the other side of the Pacific in East Asia will just have to pick up the slack and the same applies to those on the European side of the Atlantic, just another signal of the decline of the United States.
I’m sure that the same will apply to the weather satellites above.
Should Europe put sensors on the US coast to continue measuring the collapse of the AMOC ? I'm not 100% sure the US navy would enjoy that.
Europe will find proxy measurements to confirm that, thanks in no small part to US politicians, pour climate will be even more FUed than expected.
We won't send flowers, but, hey, that's your country, and you got lower taxes and better return on your cryptos, so "the rest of the world" can go to hell, I suppose ?
This too shall pass, but it can't pass fast enough.
I understand the present US administration would want to stop funding this, and that they have the power to do so.
I don't understand how that has led to the sensor network being dismantled. Surely it would have been cheaper to leave it in place and stop maintaining it?
It's not about the cost, it's about ideology. Same reason they've paid nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to energy developers to abandon offshore wind farm projects. The point isn't to save money, it's to stop green energy projects, which is an ideological goal. If their decisions don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing them through their ideological lens.
It's not an ideological goal, it's a profit goal. Ideology is just part of the propaganda engine. Isn't it funny how conservatism always seems to benefit big business? Have you ever noticed how quiet conservative politicians get when some supposedly conservative ideology ends up being bad for big business?
The way I thought it worked was that congress would set a budget and scientists would decide how to spend it.
Perhaps naively I thought these scientists would want to do science and would be unwilling to steer funds away from whichever projects they liked in order to fund the removal of some sensors.
I guess maybe the scientists who make these decisions are also partisan and happy to do as the administration asks.
They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.
Congress could stop it right now if they wanted to. They don't want to stop it. Authoritarian government requires a strong executive and a weak legislature.
I worked directly with the Ocean Networks Canada team for my engineering capstone project- they're a fantastic crew who are really clearly dedicated to providing open access to their data (they have a free API if you want to play with it!)
It's honestly a shame that this happened, but I hope they can use it to give a compelling argument for more funding in the future to expand the network (and make up the loss of data)
It's a leveled playing field now. No more pesky "I can provide data that shows..." to stand in the way of making things GREAT AGAIN. All arguments' strength rely on how much money is backing each, which is what makes all things GREAT. Facts are what those with power want it to be, not what some young upstarts claim from reading some machines. And that, again, is GREATNESS!!
to be honest I always assumed scientific sensors like those also had military applications either directly or indirectly (installing listening devices at the same time as installing the scientific equipment). That'd be partly why we fund and keep them around. But I guess not!
This decision gives them plausible reason to send a ship to every single sensor and "remove" it, nobody knows what they replace it with. Maybe the old sensor network is compromised and snooped on by another nation, so they'd need to replace it with some better, obviously classified sensor network.
The anti climate change angle and the pain inflicted to "liberal" climate scientists is a nice to have but maybe not main reason for this move.
Maybe it's part of the Epstein files, he was famously wearing US Coast Guard shirts ;)
If it also contains a sensor network to detect adversary ships and submarines, it would be bad if someone else can use it to track US submarines. Or the sensors are too old and their resolution can't detect modern mini submarines or autonomous drone ships such as the ones the Ukraine is using in the black sea, so they need to be upgraded.
These people are PR professionals and have been doing propaganda since generations. If Trump speaks about Greenland he does not mean the country but he uses it to bury another Greenland entity that he does not want to be associated with. Same with Canada the country vs. Cañada the Spanish word. Bonus is if they can ragebait their political opponents because then nobody will ever again be able to find the original story with these keywords.
And to me this kind of story and easy anti-climate-change narrative checks all the boxes.
> Starting this week, the Ocean Observatories Initiative will lose a network of more than 900 ocean sensors from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland.
> By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years.
> Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.
You think this is done to save costs? NO! This is costing more money to actively dismantle them than it would be to just abandon them. The administration is intentionally and specifically trying to destroy scientific evidence of climate change. If they just abandoned them, the next administration could reactivate and repair them.
I work for an organization that uses equipment like this. We can't afford to buy or staff this scale of equipment, and the Canadian government (DFO in particular) might have the cash to purchase the equipment but nowhere near the staff. Sensor networks are a lot of work. The ocean likes to break stuff. You need to monitor nodes extensively. It requires a broad skill set, both physically and digitally, backed by a lot of knowledge and ideally experience. These people aren't very common, so building a team to support this network outside of the USA would not be trivial.
Maybe you could part it out to a number of orgs and governments, but I doubt the US government has much interest in putting in the labour to facilitate that. This entire project seems like it's designed to be offensive as it is to be anything else.
If we sell them to another country, then that other country will gather the data and publish it. The point of the Trump administration is that the data not be gathered.
This seems to be a case of administration impounding funds authorized by Congress for this purpose. As in they’re just spending what Congress told them to.
And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.
It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.
Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling
I cannot understand the decision to withdraw this for purely political reasons. What I don't understand about the Trump administration is that they are dismantling all of America's diplomatic power. Trump has the 'ability to become president'—self PR, black propaganda against opponents, that sort of thing. But he does not have the 'ability to run a country.'
As Professor Ed Dever said, after ten years we are only now beginning to get 'some hints,' yet they present it as if no solution has been offered. But this kind of data is long term time series data. If some of it gets damaged, it would take decades of operation again.
The value being undermined in the United States is enormous. They withdraw this simply because their supporters don't believe in climate change, for the sake of approval ratings. But this damages trust in long term research projects in the US, and America's leadership in the R&D world. If the cost is that high, why did they go to war with Iran?
There are so many things I don't understand. Why, while calling themselves a consumer nation, are they destroying the hegemony they themselves built?
True dominance requires the consent of the governed. America's status as the strongest superpower was a product of the consent of surrounding subordinate nations. That's what Antonio Gramsci talked about.
Things the US scaled back, like USAID, also created a favorable image of American imperialism. So even though the US invaded and destroyed South American countries in reality, it played a role in making people believe it was truly about freedom and progress. That is symbolic capital. But what Trump is doing now is beyond comprehension.
From a third party perspective, Trump administration policies make it look like they imagine a feudal system built on top of America as the supreme state. They are destroying long term leadership and the trust the US has built.
Some might call the Trump administration's actions 'unpretentious honesty.' But this is not honesty. It's just greed. The Trump administration seems to have created America's bankruptcy. In my view, Trump always wins. It's just not America's victory
>The Trump administration seems to have created America's bankruptcy. In my view, Trump always wins. It's just not America's victory
You summed it up perfectly right there. It's not about anything good for America or really anything good at all. It's pure greed. It's doing the bidding of whoever is paying him the most. It's destroying America on purpose for the benefit of foreign and international interests. I honestly believe they are trying to engineer the most possible death and destruction so that they can swoop in an take what's left for themselves. Destroy the economy and buy everything up at bargain sale prices. Starve the people and deny them any relief. Make homelessness illegal so you can legally enslave them. Those that don't starve to death will work in the camps.
The reason they do this is because they are, like many other people in this country, completely driven mad by religious fervor. It seems completely irrational because it is.
Silicon Valley is filled with people, at the top echelons of the most valuable companies in the world, who genuinely believe they have invented divine intelligence by making a mathematical model of human speech.
Utah is for all intents and purposes a religious enclave.
We’re just like this - I don’t know what else to say. I guess we were better at hiding it when we felt we had something to lose.
It's not the majority of us. Unfortunately too many people don't care and don't think elections matter so we've allowed an extremist minority to dominate, fueled by right-wing media propaganda.
To be fair, the other party that matters has dropped the ball on too many occasions, or been complicit, so there's some reason for all the apathy. That plus winner-takes all elections leaves a lot of people feeling like their vote doesn't matter.
The trump administration is anti science, anti anything that provides evidence for climate change. They’re obsessively pro fossil fuels and anti green anything.
What I’m “shocked” about is that this is news to anyone.
IIRC, Project 2025 argued that private companies provided more accurate weather forecasts, and thus one can just dismantle gov. agencies like NOAA and the market for such services will take care of itself.
Perhaps EU or China could build their own network of sensors to track this stuff? It's dangerous for so much science to be dependent on a country run by anti-science idiots.
I sincerely hope that China wins the AI race, for the sake of myself and my children. The Chinese Communist party might be evil, but at least they accept fundamental natural sciences, and are actively investing in technologies that help avoiding worst climate scenarios. Buying anything American instead of EU or Chinese alternatives has become deeply unethical to me.
>Perhaps EU or China could build their own network of sensors to track this stuff?
already do, the EU is in particular collects a ton of oceanographic data through for example the Copernicus Marine Service, but these particular sensors are in waters close to Oregon, Washington and Alaska, not really anything the EU or China could replace.
In its region the US is naturally not really replaceable, it's simply a big blow to research.
Here is what the National Science Foundation has to say about it:
> "The decision to de-scope aligns with NSF's wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart life cycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio."
Seems like even if we want to understand the justifications, the people making these decisions don't care to share them with us.
Wow that quote is the most useless bullshit bunch of words I've seen strung together recently. It says a whole lot of nothing in the most insulting way possible. Must have been written by a highly paid consultant.
As a physical oceanographer, the destruction of these observing systems is horrific.
It is hard to stress enough how intentionally OMB is trying to disassemble American science. The new (proposed) OMB guidelines prohibit international collaboration without pre approval for example. They also codify a political grant approval process. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/the-office-of-manage...
Additionally, OMB is not releasing the congressional appropriated funds that they are required to. This is currently tanking the post-doctoral researcher market and eventually will wipe out a generation of researchers if it isn’t stopped. https://grant-witness.us/funding_curves_nsf.html
Please call your elected representatives! It is so so important! https://5calls.org/issue/federal-financial-assistance-scienc...
The other thing they've done is make it possible to cancel any grant at any time if it goes against the politics of the current executive administration.
Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing, entire areas of science have flourished that would never have happened otherwise.
That's not to say that politics is completely out of science, Congress has done things like ban any research money for gun safety, for example. But that had to make it through Congress, a vote across party lines, instead of just being the political whim of some bureaucrat that can cancel whatever they want whenever they want.
For every issue you read about here on HN, there are about 10 other policy changes designed to destroy the US's scientific infrastructure. It doesn't get much attention because of all the other chaos going on, and scientists tend to be pretty quiet and try to stay apolitical, but it is truly a full-on crisis in the scientific research community right now. You won't see immediate effects, but in 10-20 years when China zooms ahead of the US on all research fronts and the US is left out of key technology and science directions, we will feel it then.
And the non-cancellable nature of grants is not just a nice-to-have, it's absolutely critical for research with upfront capital costs (buying equipment, building labs, etc.)
The very _fact_ that this is a policy is disrupting research, even if specific grants haven't been cancelled. Some universities are stepping in to backstop, but it's a powerful chilling effect.
People here are missing that they're not dismantling random things. There is a system to it, the objective of which is far more sinister than mere ideology.
The sensors in question here are crucial to monitor the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
They don't want that monitored because it is currently breaking down. Not some arbitrary far away time, now.
The science of this gets astroturfed into some nonsense "we don't really know". We do.
But conveniently, now the data to show this to the incredulous won't exist.
When did evidence ever change the minds of the incredulous? The whole debate has become so polluted by the forces who want no action on climate change we can’t even use the original description any more.
Some of the specific grants that have been cancelled are shocking in the negative effect they will have on the ecosystem. Cutting off Sean Eddy, a giant in DNA analysis, just baffles the mind:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/11/nx-s1-5807995/some-researcher...
There's not even any political angle to pursue here, it is just lighting knowledge on fire with no grander purpose.
Understandable, as DNA analysis takes all the fun from raping people without consequences, making it much more inconvenient to hide. Criminals from the entire planet hate DNA analysis with passion. War criminals and sex criminals specially.
A professor I worked for in college was a big fan of how the US funding was fragmented, with some coming from the NSF, some from NIH, Energy Ag, each branch of the military... if one department had a loon in charge, the others would keep things running smoothly.
Yeah, that was one massive benefit of the fragmentation of scientific funding, just like how in the private sector there's a great diversity of funders, of employers, etc. etc. etc.
All that's now been reduced to a single kill switch at the very top, and they're trying to change all the non-political positions into political appointees so that they have control not only with a veto at the top, but control of every single decision along the entire way, without any of that pesky scientific merit getting in the way.
>Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing
Please don't take this as a defense of the Trump administration pulling these ocean sensors, but the previous administration also had political demands on grants. One of the better articles about this I've found is "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge" - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-an...
This ended up getting grants cancelled because they'd throw in a line so the DEI checkbox would get checked, and then Cruz went through with a hacksaw and cancelled the grant for it, as Scott Alexander found - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...
This is a good point but its apple vs oranges. This administration is literally politicizing and destroying science funding.
Agreed on the second part, it's pretty terrible. Just absolutely wasteful, and the proposed centralization of research funding is the wrong direction.
Disagree on the first. It wasn't as crude, but the politicization was absolutely there.
https://www.project2025.observer/
OMB = “Office of Management and Budget”.
It’s a White House office run by Russell Vought, highly ideological maga institutionalist.
Also famous for being a principal architect and author of Project 2025, which explicitly calls for impoundment as a mechanism for expanding presidential authority to control the Federal budget for political purposes.
In order to usher in their Theocratic Dictatorship, they need to have an un-educated population. This is the start. I hope it takes a few generations and the tide can be turned. But at this rate, the US might end within the next couple years, not decades.
I don't think they are really even trying to hide it. Project 2025 was pretty obvious road map.
It's not even about an uneducated population. It's about preventing research that might be inconvenient politically. Ocean sensors provide evidence of climate change and the current political agenda is to suppress evidence of climate change.
anyone knowing anything is dangerous to fascists. unmoored radicalism does not appreciate competent people.
destroying the professional class and reducing everyone to serfs has been an active ongoing never-closed plot against America that has never been snuffed out, and that is having it's day. the Business Plot people walk among us, and here, 93 years latter, they are getting the hollowing out of the state and any possible upstanding world anchored in anything good that they've worked for. these people, these people, these people.
Also trying to indebt the government so much as to prevent anything useful from being restored.
Sadly, he will not be jailed for all the destruction he has caused. Can we send him the repair bill after he's out of office?
(and one of the authors of Project 2025)
He’s a self described Christian nationalist. He literally believes the laws should reflect Christian morals and views. Like a right wing sharia. And that’s what Project 2025 includes. Things like age verification for porn are meant to be backdoor porn bans, and also meant to hurt gay and lesbian culture. But it’s based on a puritanical Christian theocratic sort of view.
I thought it might be Orange Man Baby.
The elected reps are captured by business interests. Citizens united means the best marketing team wins every election. The reps do not work for citizens, why would they? Voting has been nullified, democracy is dead.
It's borderline evil. The only reason they are doing this is to silence the science that contradicts their agenda.
I get the part about old school corruption where your cronies get to steal from the government (hello Big Coal/Big Oil), but to figuratively shit on the people of the world out of spite takes it to a whole new level...of evil.
Unfortunately as a resident of the SF Bay Area, calling my elected representative is next to useless. :/
Blame 'The Reapportionment Act of 1929', the representatives capped their number and denied you adequate representation.
If you did call you may get a response from one of your representative's staff, the number which are granted is based on the population of your state.
Do it anyway!
Can anyone explain that "anti-science" crusade to me? This doesn't seem to have any effect than reduce America's standing in the world.
They're ideological goals, not technical ones. If they don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing it through their ideological lens.
They're isolationists. They do not care about America's standing in the world.
> reduce America's standing in the world.
That is the goal.
A small price to pay to increase the standing of a select few. /s
If you want to be an authoritarian ruler, truth is the first thing you have to eliminate! If noone knows what is true, a leader can tell you what to believe! Science is our method to determine truth! A führer cannot have that!
More than that if you're a professor (and thus an educator for the next generation) you're now incentivized to modify your speech in favour of the authoritarian in order to keep getting funding.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which funding to these is being cut because climate scientists have historically been politically opposed to certain large republican donors that make their fortunes burning fossil fuels.
It was also the first things Hitler and Mussolini did once they got power.
And Mao and Lenin! Stalin's efforts at this are unparalleled, honestly, and we even allied with that asshole against Hitler and Mussolini.
All totalitarians eliminate any other source of truth, power, or influence except themselves.
The primary goal of authoritarianism is consolidation of power among a small number of elites. Anything that can reduce that power is an enemy.
The essential weakness that the powerful elites have is that they are, by definition, outnumbered. So in order to consolidate and maintain power, they need to disturb any system that the masses can use to coordinate and form collective action.
(It's a kid's movie, but Hopper's speech in "A Bug's Life" captures this very well: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1hfo90u/hoppers_jus...)
Reality has a strong consensus-creating effect. We all live in the same material world, so simply by understanding it better and sharing that understanding, we will automatically trend towards having more common ground and more agreement.
That's a threat to elite power, so authoritarian governments have always been anti-science. They may pay it lip service, or attempt to harness it to their own ends, but they never want an entire populace that it well-educated and grounded in reality, because well-informed masses are harder to divide and conquer.
You start from the premise of authoritarianism yet provide no support. What supporting evidence do you have?
I would point to the consistent consolidation of power upward in our government, from Congress to the President, away from States to Congress, away from local governments to State. Our population grows and yet congress is capped, our problems and cases grow and yet the Supreme Court isn't being increased and instead picks and chooses cases that support the federal government.
I find it hard to believe anyone is willingly ceding power upward except towards the goal of a stronger more authoritarian rule by the elite classes because they don't think lesser people are worthy of making decisions. They don't care about stepping on others as long as they think they will get to do the stepping.
What supporting evidence would convince you concretely?
That they're fascist? And project 2025 is essentially a blueprint of what Hitler did by purging the bureaucracy of anyone that might oppose him. The new OMB guidelines extends it to anyone getting grants to do science.
Its clear that Vought, Miller and even Vance are fans of Carl Schmitt as they're implementing his ideas, Vance has even mentioned him publicly.
Pretty much every single part of Project 2025 is designed to reduce America's standing in the world, not just the anti-science parts of it.
It's a general trend across all authoritarian regimes; it's harder to be authoritarian with lots of international connections, with lots of strength and partnerships.
Autarky, authoritarianism, isolation, all go together (along with weak economies, etc., but the goal isn't to have the biggest amount of pie, the goal is to be able to control all the pie slices and take the biggest portion, even if the pie is far smaller.)
It's all outlined in Gulliver's Travels.
Studying the ocean temperatures verifies that climate change is not a hoax. "He" is making money off fossil fuels. That is enough of a reason for being anti-science. This is the same guy that decided that the COVID numbers would go down if we just stopped measuring them. Burying his head in the sand is his go-to solution for all problems.
If you believe that our leadership is being influenced by actors such as Vladimir Putin, then you see that this is intended.
The steel man is that you can’t peer review your way to breakthroughs that change consensus, because peer review relies on consensus, so peer review has to be made subordinate to accountable decision makers.
If we do not have objective facts and data, the truth is whatever the loudest person says it is.
I think this is part of an anti-climate change agenda, which is about protecting fossil fuel investments. Not sure that it is broadly anti-science, except maybe in the sense of being against public funding broadly.
Once you start asking what Trump would do differently if he actually were an agent or captive of hostile foreign interests, the rest will begin to make more sense.
There's a lot of collateral damage that could have been avoided if millions weren't being squandered on dubious "science" like studying grooming habits of trans aboriginals in the Central African Republic (a made-up scenario, but there are many like it).
At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.
A lot of this “dubious science” isn’t dubious at all. Rather, people just have a political view on it. Like climate change is considered dubious science by the right. It’s not, but that’s how they view it.
There's nobody gatekeeping what can be studied and what can't. You claim millions are being wasted; by who? Is the goverment funding the studies you deem as wasted? If so you'd think that rather than making up a study you'd be able to give a single example. Should be very easy if millions are being wasted on these what I'd assume you'd call "bogus" studies.
Aren't you in any way concerned that you can't give a real example of the sort of thing you're talking about, and have to make one up? This should be the wake-up call that makes you re-evaluate your priors.
The reality is that reactionaries often describe "useless" scientific endeavors like "condoms for worms" that end up being the only thing stopping parasitic screwworms from infesting the US cattle herd, which will end up costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to resolve- and spike the already-high cost of beef for decades.
Seriously, when our tax dollars pay for idiots to play around with lizard spit[1] all day, why should we trust anything they want to fund?
[1] https://biomedical-sciences.uq.edu.au/article/2024/04/rise-o...
What's next, paying them to study worms??
https://www.wgal.com/article/new-world-screwworm-pennsylvani...
Instead of getting upset about made up scenarios, why don't you find some real scenarios? Like the one this thread is discussing, for instance.
> a made-up scenario, but there are many like it)
There are many made-up scenarios, but not many real examples of what you are using to justify the weakening of the entire nation.
And the fact that you had to fabricate something is literally proof of it. Now, go find any supposed "waste" and you'll find that, again, the science has been completely misrepresented to the public by an anti-science media source that was focused on creating fake propaganda rather than properly informing the public.
Seriously. Prove me wrong, go find all this bath water that you claim exists, post it here!
Exactly, it’s a failure to gatekeep and self-police. You can’t tell truths about rocks and lies about people.
Give me an example of this supposed phenomenon, because I haven't seen it. And anytime I've heard somebody claim with an actual example, it's been easy to disprove their assertions.
> wipe out a generation of researchers
It’s really hard to take this seriously after the COVID research shutdowns. You reap what you sow.
What COVID research shutdowns are you talking about? That's too vague to understand, it could mean anything of any sort of political motivation! But with COVID specifically, there's an entire industry devoted to feeding fake conspiracies, so you'll have to be very specific in order for anybody to agree with you.
It's pretty clear that peyton is just trolling this discussion right now.
Look at all of the headlines coming out of the department of energy:
https://www.energy.gov/newsroom
Lots of them related to coal and LNG.
Most prominently: https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-invest-350...
The policy of the federal government is anti renewable energy and pro coal, pro oil.
Oil executives are profiting from the situation with Iran. These guys don't want us to have cheap renewable energy. They want us to keep paying their tolls and they don't want anyone to have access to evidence that could continue exposing the damage they've done to the environment.
The DoE is posting misinformation constantly, they seem to just be old oil people. Idk how they're still flying under the radar.
None of it is under the radar anymore, they have a radicalized supporter base and increasingly dictatorial control over the basic functioning of government. Subtlety is no longer necessary under those conditions.
The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.
These sensors and a bunch of other scientific research for a thousand years, or pointless war with Iran for 3 months.
Cost has nothing to do with it. This was all laid out in the project 2025 manifesto. Burn it all down with no regard to money previously invested. Makes it harder for future administrations to rebuild. Halting the collection of data is not enough. Maintenance is 5% or less of the cost to deploy new. If they destroy it, it makes the cost to rebuild (including having to re-seek congressional approval) that much harder and time consuming.
And if they do accidentally destroy something that they want, it can be rebuilt by a private contractor friendly to the administration.
The war is making a lot of money for trump and his family, the science was just making some of Trump's biggest bribers look bad.
The US military budget is 900 billion dollars. The government can afford a few hundred million for some sensors, it should not need private sector patrons
> The US military budget is 900 billion dollars.
The new budget proposal is $1.5T
That number, incidentally, is the entire NATO military budget. Which scares me because I can imagine someone planning on taking action that would result in the dissolution of NATO thinking they can make up the difference that way and choosing that number with that in mind.
The government has already paid for the sensors.
> The US military budget is 900 billion dollars.
And we're about to pay over a third of that to Iran?
Is it actually coming out of the military budget? I assumed we were just going to get taxed for it, or they'd pull it from some other places that actually needs the funds.
Alternatively, they could just increase the military budget by 300 billion (or more).
My understanding was that the US green-lighted a 300-billion investment from neighboring countries to rebuild.
Nobody outside the administration knows what the US has greenlit, and a detailed peace agreement likely doesn't exist yet.
It's a good measure of scale. The USA is paying Iran an amount that is 1/3rd of its military budget in reparations because they "won".
No, that was fake news. The 300 billion dollars isn't coming from the US.
How would you even know that? We haven't seen the agreement yet.
>We haven't seen the agreement yet.
Which why the $300 million claim is fake news.
That 300 billion number came from JD Vance. Do you think he lied, or what?
No, that was fake news. The 300 billion dollars isn't coming from the US.
Specifically, it is unfreezing previously frozen/stolen assets that belong to Iran.
That's only part of it, the US and allies are reportedly going to set up a $300 billion fund for Iran, the particular terms of accessing it aren't clear at this point. GP is correct in that the US is not putting up $300 billion, but it will be putting up part of that money. The US fought and lost a war and Iran comes out ahead, and the US and its allies come out worse and poorer.
>The US fought and lost a war and Iran comes out ahead, and the US and its allies come out worse and poorer.
That is also fake news. The US did not lose the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war
> That is also fake news.
You keep using those words, but it's clear you don't know what they mean (or what anything means). Enjoy your trolling.
It’s nothing to do with money, that’s always the libertarian excuse, and HN laps it up far more than the rest of the word.
Whatever delusions I once held that software engineers are above average intelligence were completely eradicated by seeing how many HN commenters eagerly bought into the obvious lies about DOGE and their goals (amongst other things). It was embarrassing. They sure seem to be a lot quieter about that now, though.
Have to sternly disagree: at least on the conservative side, it is thoroughly lapped up. Right wingers the world over constantly vote to fuck themselves and the rest of us over with this never ending whingeing about debt, spending, pork, what have you. On this particular issue it's even less surprising since the only thing perhaps a right winger wants to hear less about than government spending is climate change.
The entire debt ceiling bullshit is political theatre and always has been. We didn't even have a debt ceiling for the majority of our existence as a nation, and since it's creation by right wingers, it has been used as a bludgeon by right wingers to kneecap anything that stood to benefit the civil good of our country. Austerity politics have been deployed here and elsewhere to great effect to destroy social programs, demonize those who need them, and reallocate trillions of dollars to the private sector to provide the same services the public sector did, but worse, and while enriching greedy assholes the entire way. And the whole way it has been done by an enthusiastic and approving portion of the public who can be persuaded to feel outrage that seventy cents of their yearly taxes are going to some program in some far off part of the country they'll never see.
Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again. And every time we want to do something science and evidence backed like give the homeless somewhere to live, we're met with a chorus of WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR IT, but every goddamn time there's another country full of brown kids to blow the fuck off the face of the Earth, we always, always have money for that.
It's disgusting and I hate it here.
> Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again.
Exactly. If the people on the right cared at all about government spending they'd never vote republican again, which just shows us that they don't actually care about government spending. They don't seem to want to talk about the things they really do care about too loudly though.
Its not even about saving money. If they just wanted to save money they'd just stop paying attention to the data coming in, retask/lay off the people working on it, and let the buoys stay out there. A dumb idea to me, but at least that's consistent. Let other organizations decide to manage the buoys. While I'd prefer for the government to do it, it could be possible to have other groups fund such things. It would be a lot cheaper, easier, and allow for a smoother transition with no lost data for some other org or government to take over the project.
Instead, we're paying money to pull the sensors out of the water. We're actively spending money to blind ourselves to things we know are growing areas of concern.
It's also (according to some in Congress) an illegal action as Congress authorized and funded the project:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/lawmakers-fight-to-stop...
But that just seems like par for the course for the current administration, whether it's tariffs or ballrooms or ocean sensors - do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
Well the majority party in Congress could put a stop to it at any time. The fact that they don't, and haven't just on about any related issue, tells you everything you need to know. They just don't want to put their names on it in case public opinion sours, then they can at least try to keep their jobs and claim innocence.
> do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
don't forget that the courts have already decided that anything this president does is legally okay because he's immune from punishment for breaking any law as long as they decide the illegal activity was an "official act".
Congress isn't toothless so I just don't see how I can believe anything but that the majority of congress, whether they claim opposition or not, is onboard with this nonsense. They are completely out of touch and it seems like they are just playing a game of PR hot potato to avoid taking any real action.
This is the strangest part to me. They will spend millions and several years to dismantle a system that, realistically, could also just be abandoned. Not that we should leave more random, unused equipment out in the world, but if this were really about cost savings, and given this administration does not care at all about the environment, then leaving the equipment in place was the best option by their stated rationale.
If they just abandon them then a subsequent administration can simply re-activate them without being forced to spend even more money.
Astronaut meme: it was never about cost savings
This administration is extremely wasteful despite the mantra about reducing waste, fraud and abuse. In fact it's done the opposite of all three things.
In what world is more spending for less data a good deal?
If you are in the oil, gas and coal business and the money spent is coming out of someone else's pocket then it's a great deal.
"Don't Look Up" was a documentary.
Lol Big Tech employees don’t have desires beyond money at any cost.
Read the article, but I'm still not seeing why the U.S. is pulling these sensors. Anyone have any insight?
There's no point in spending taxpayer money understanding what may or may not happen in the future, when we already know what will happen: Jesus is coming back. We need to spend on the military for the final battle of Armageddon.
^ Literally the beliefs of the most influential part of the political base of the administration.
Is this from Bannon and co.? What is their rationale for being militaristic during a return of Jesus? Wouldn't Jesus not like that very much?
I don't think they literally believe it. They ostensibly espouse this for political purposes, but it doesn't appear they believe in any permanent objective or thing other than their own power and profit.
There is no way to know what Jesus would or wouldn't like. Most religious people interpret their chosen text in whatever way best fits their preferences and lifestyle. In this case, they like war, so that means Jesus also likes war: https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-ir.... It is trivial to find Bible verses supporting war if that's what you're looking for: https://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/bible-verses-....
This is known as 'negotiating with the text' and people get extremely mad when you describe what they're doing.
Political strategy. Step one of controlling a population is to stop information flow; you can't stop something bad happening if you don't know about it. Since the party in charge thinks climate change is a hoax, all efforts at slowing climate change are therefore bad. So you remove the tools people use to document and respond to climate change, and now everything is fixed, in your world view.
Because they're scientific instruments to collect data
Specifically climate data, which can be used to argue for climate change action.
As the old joke went, the easiest way to not have detected covid cases in the country is to stop testing. Very simple, very effective.
Not an actual joke, this was Trump's idea during his first term.
And not old... literally only 6 years ago.
The current administration doesn’t care about climate change, or believes it’s a hoax. Given this, they see no need to fund research and data gathering that tells them otherwise.
That is a charatable interpretation. A more negative take is they are purposely suppressing the evidence.
No, they are attacking any and all forms of data collection that can be connected to climate change - even if it's not specifically for climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
Not just climate data, they are changing how census data is aggregated so they can reverse-individualize for political goals, discussed 3 days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...
To be fair, the public in large also dgaf about climate change.
Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care.
This is not true, most people care about climate change, even in the US (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...). Maybe you think "if they care then why are they still driving/flying/eating meat/whatever" and I sympathize, but climate change is not an issue that will be solved by individuals taking responsibility, in the same way that wars still happen even when the vast majority of the population oppose them.
If you're wondering why they don't at least vote for someone who cares about climate change, I don't know. But claiming people don't care at all is not true and is self-defeating, because it makes people who do care think "I guess I'm in the minority, there's no point in trying".
> Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care
We already have them. People just claim they're chance effects with no connection to climate change.
The problem with refuting it is that they are chance events, there's no way to definitively say "this was caused by climate change", because it's always possible it would have happened anyways. It's the upwards trend in frequency and severity that we can definitively point and say "that's caused by climate change", but that's too abstract for most people to understand.
Well, it is an El Nino year...
It doesn't make much sense.
There are massive gaps in our current climate models because we have almost no data about subsurface ocean dynamics. Many of the assumptions about the oceanic environment in climate models were demonstrated to not match empirical measurement a few decades ago but we don't have enough oceanic data to come up with a coherent model for the observed dynamics. Without a plausible model for these dynamics, any predictions made from climate models have a high probability of being significantly incorrect.
These sensor networks were the first step toward collecting some data that would allow us to develop a plausible model for subsurface ocean dynamics. To be clear, we are probably still a couple decades out from this in any case but removing these sensor networks from operation definitely won't help. There are very few efforts to collect this data at scale, I believe this was one of the largest.
Most people don't realize how critical subsurface sensor networks are to building accurate climate models.
Russel Vought. Look him up.
Dismantling monitoring programs which show evidence of climate change is one of the Project 2025 priorities.
Specifically, their plan calls for downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025, p. 676), and breaking up NOAA (p. 674), because they view these agencies as a source of "climate alarmism" and that "the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded."
"See no evil, hear no evil" - literally.
> Why they do this?
Because it damages USA. As other thousands of nonsensical choices in the last years, America always, consistently, ends scammed milked, and holding the shorter straw. Everything in this government is designed specifically to the inch to humiliate and destroy US. Acting exactly like foreign enemy agents for fun and profit.
Or maybe because it could be used (in theory) to register submarine's position.
Or maybe somebody expects to benefit from the climate change in some way, and couldn't care less if half of the planet became inhabitable in the process. There aren't many other reasonable explanations.
do you expect there to be logic behind it?
I hope there isn't, because if there is, it has a lot of implications that are unpleasant to think about.
Best start thinking about those implications because it is unwise to underestimate what is coming.
Science is evil and must be destroyed at all costs.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
Applying even an ounce of argumentative empathy will make you more convincing and psychologically healthier.
How would you explain it? It seems either entirely ideological on the part of its architects, cynically designed to appeal to a political base that has been inculcated with that ideology, or cynically designed to enrich its architects' political and business allies under cover of appealing to a political base that has been inculcated with that ideology. Possibly some combination of those three. But the core issue is opposition to and misrepresentation of scientific consensus, on the part of an administration that has referred to its political opponents as "the enemy from within".
it is extremely difficult to do in cases like this. again, why are we pulling the sensors? why not leave them in place and stop paying for maintenance?
why not find alternate funding mechanisms?
because we know who these people are, and what their motives are. they show us time and and time again.
empathy is something to be used against us.
Well. Even if you want to attribute a bad motive that would give more clarity. Maybe the people involved in these projects have expressed disagreement with the admin, so they don’t want to pay them.
What’s so important about these particular sensors that any change in resourcing is a categorical evil?
Because they're Woke sensors that are collecting woke lies about the Chinese Climate Change Hoax of course.
Also Accuweather paid a lot of money for this president and they are very interested in not having the US government compete against them with free, high-quality weather forecasting.
Now this would be more credible to me.
It's in the republican party's interest to ensure there's as little data as possible showing any form of climate anomalies. Their party platform is that climate change is not real, and Trump is personally a big fan of coal power.
And it's not even a secret, Trump, his officials and supporters all say this.
It’s to avoid collecting data that would point to major climate change issues. Things like disruption of currents that circulate across oceans. It’s really a dishonest move. We already paid to have this network of sensors, and they’re supposed to run for another 20 years. Instead they will spend 2 years visiting all this infrastructure that we have in place, and pulling it out of the oceans.
Any data that can even remotely be tied to the climate could be used against the Turd Reich. The Fuhrer cannot allow it.
Sure, it's to punish Trump's political opponents. That's all there is to it. Liberals politicians tend to support scientific endeavors, Trump wants to punish them.
Don't make it more complicated than it actually is.
For simple minded people like Trump and his followers yes. For the ones pulling his strings they have motives and reasons beyond the idiots they put in as a figurehead.
Im not sure if you know but the current US government is very much anti-science
The countries on the other side of the Pacific in East Asia will just have to pick up the slack and the same applies to those on the European side of the Atlantic, just another signal of the decline of the United States.
I’m sure that the same will apply to the weather satellites above.
Should Europe put sensors on the US coast to continue measuring the collapse of the AMOC ? I'm not 100% sure the US navy would enjoy that.
Europe will find proxy measurements to confirm that, thanks in no small part to US politicians, pour climate will be even more FUed than expected.
We won't send flowers, but, hey, that's your country, and you got lower taxes and better return on your cryptos, so "the rest of the world" can go to hell, I suppose ?
This too shall pass, but it can't pass fast enough.
I understand the present US administration would want to stop funding this, and that they have the power to do so.
I don't understand how that has led to the sensor network being dismantled. Surely it would have been cheaper to leave it in place and stop maintaining it?
It's not about the cost, it's about ideology. Same reason they've paid nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to energy developers to abandon offshore wind farm projects. The point isn't to save money, it's to stop green energy projects, which is an ideological goal. If their decisions don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing them through their ideological lens.
It's not an ideological goal, it's a profit goal. Ideology is just part of the propaganda engine. Isn't it funny how conservatism always seems to benefit big business? Have you ever noticed how quiet conservative politicians get when some supposedly conservative ideology ends up being bad for big business?
The way I thought it worked was that congress would set a budget and scientists would decide how to spend it.
Perhaps naively I thought these scientists would want to do science and would be unwilling to steer funds away from whichever projects they liked in order to fund the removal of some sensors.
I guess maybe the scientists who make these decisions are also partisan and happy to do as the administration asks.
“Have the power”
They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.
Congress could stop it right now if they wanted to. They don't want to stop it. Authoritarian government requires a strong executive and a weak legislature.
If you destroy the sensor network now, it is that much more expensive for a future administration to rebuild from scratch.
The North Atlantic’s ‘cold blob’ may signal a major current’s decline https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cold-blob-may-signal-cur...
I worked directly with the Ocean Networks Canada team for my engineering capstone project- they're a fantastic crew who are really clearly dedicated to providing open access to their data (they have a free API if you want to play with it!)
It's honestly a shame that this happened, but I hope they can use it to give a compelling argument for more funding in the future to expand the network (and make up the loss of data)
Care to link this free API
The final rebuttal to “the data doesn’t lie”: pull the sensors.
It's a natural extension of "stop the count" and "if we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases".
It's a leveled playing field now. No more pesky "I can provide data that shows..." to stand in the way of making things GREAT AGAIN. All arguments' strength rely on how much money is backing each, which is what makes all things GREAT. Facts are what those with power want it to be, not what some young upstarts claim from reading some machines. And that, again, is GREATNESS!!
100% !
to be honest I always assumed scientific sensors like those also had military applications either directly or indirectly (installing listening devices at the same time as installing the scientific equipment). That'd be partly why we fund and keep them around. But I guess not!
They do, but trump doesn't really care about military readiness.
This decision gives them plausible reason to send a ship to every single sensor and "remove" it, nobody knows what they replace it with. Maybe the old sensor network is compromised and snooped on by another nation, so they'd need to replace it with some better, obviously classified sensor network.
The anti climate change angle and the pain inflicted to "liberal" climate scientists is a nice to have but maybe not main reason for this move.
Is there anything that would point to this possibly being the case?
Maybe it's part of the Epstein files, he was famously wearing US Coast Guard shirts ;)
If it also contains a sensor network to detect adversary ships and submarines, it would be bad if someone else can use it to track US submarines. Or the sensors are too old and their resolution can't detect modern mini submarines or autonomous drone ships such as the ones the Ukraine is using in the black sea, so they need to be upgraded.
These people are PR professionals and have been doing propaganda since generations. If Trump speaks about Greenland he does not mean the country but he uses it to bury another Greenland entity that he does not want to be associated with. Same with Canada the country vs. Cañada the Spanish word. Bonus is if they can ragebait their political opponents because then nobody will ever again be able to find the original story with these keywords.
And to me this kind of story and easy anti-climate-change narrative checks all the boxes.
> Starting this week, the Ocean Observatories Initiative will lose a network of more than 900 ocean sensors from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland.
> By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years.
> Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.
Defunding science is embarassing and sad.
Don’t forget wantonly destructive.
Why not just sell them to some other country? Surely Canada would buy the in-place sensors and take them over.
You think this is done to save costs? NO! This is costing more money to actively dismantle them than it would be to just abandon them. The administration is intentionally and specifically trying to destroy scientific evidence of climate change. If they just abandoned them, the next administration could reactivate and repair them.
People in the libertarian SV techbro world actually fall for the randian crap and believe that’s what they are getting.
And that’s the charitable interpretation.
I work for an organization that uses equipment like this. We can't afford to buy or staff this scale of equipment, and the Canadian government (DFO in particular) might have the cash to purchase the equipment but nowhere near the staff. Sensor networks are a lot of work. The ocean likes to break stuff. You need to monitor nodes extensively. It requires a broad skill set, both physically and digitally, backed by a lot of knowledge and ideally experience. These people aren't very common, so building a team to support this network outside of the USA would not be trivial.
Maybe you could part it out to a number of orgs and governments, but I doubt the US government has much interest in putting in the labour to facilitate that. This entire project seems like it's designed to be offensive as it is to be anything else.
It's an enormous shame.
Beyond the regime's hatred of science, they also hate Canada, so that would never happen.
If we sell them to another country, then that other country will gather the data and publish it. The point of the Trump administration is that the data not be gathered.
They explicitly do not want them. They will pay companies to abandon renewable energy projects that have already planned / started.
This seems to be a case of administration impounding funds authorized by Congress for this purpose. As in they’re just spending what Congress told them to.
And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.
It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.
Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling
https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-tr...
The first thing you do when you want to improve a metric is to start measuring it.
When you don’t care about that thing anymore you stop measuring it.
Ripping out sensors is the equivalent of shooting the messenger.
I cannot understand the decision to withdraw this for purely political reasons. What I don't understand about the Trump administration is that they are dismantling all of America's diplomatic power. Trump has the 'ability to become president'—self PR, black propaganda against opponents, that sort of thing. But he does not have the 'ability to run a country.'
As Professor Ed Dever said, after ten years we are only now beginning to get 'some hints,' yet they present it as if no solution has been offered. But this kind of data is long term time series data. If some of it gets damaged, it would take decades of operation again.
The value being undermined in the United States is enormous. They withdraw this simply because their supporters don't believe in climate change, for the sake of approval ratings. But this damages trust in long term research projects in the US, and America's leadership in the R&D world. If the cost is that high, why did they go to war with Iran?
There are so many things I don't understand. Why, while calling themselves a consumer nation, are they destroying the hegemony they themselves built?
True dominance requires the consent of the governed. America's status as the strongest superpower was a product of the consent of surrounding subordinate nations. That's what Antonio Gramsci talked about.
Things the US scaled back, like USAID, also created a favorable image of American imperialism. So even though the US invaded and destroyed South American countries in reality, it played a role in making people believe it was truly about freedom and progress. That is symbolic capital. But what Trump is doing now is beyond comprehension.
From a third party perspective, Trump administration policies make it look like they imagine a feudal system built on top of America as the supreme state. They are destroying long term leadership and the trust the US has built.
Some might call the Trump administration's actions 'unpretentious honesty.' But this is not honesty. It's just greed. The Trump administration seems to have created America's bankruptcy. In my view, Trump always wins. It's just not America's victory
>The Trump administration seems to have created America's bankruptcy. In my view, Trump always wins. It's just not America's victory
You summed it up perfectly right there. It's not about anything good for America or really anything good at all. It's pure greed. It's doing the bidding of whoever is paying him the most. It's destroying America on purpose for the benefit of foreign and international interests. I honestly believe they are trying to engineer the most possible death and destruction so that they can swoop in an take what's left for themselves. Destroy the economy and buy everything up at bargain sale prices. Starve the people and deny them any relief. Make homelessness illegal so you can legally enslave them. Those that don't starve to death will work in the camps.
The reason they do this is because they are, like many other people in this country, completely driven mad by religious fervor. It seems completely irrational because it is.
Silicon Valley is filled with people, at the top echelons of the most valuable companies in the world, who genuinely believe they have invented divine intelligence by making a mathematical model of human speech.
Utah is for all intents and purposes a religious enclave.
We’re just like this - I don’t know what else to say. I guess we were better at hiding it when we felt we had something to lose.
It's not the majority of us. Unfortunately too many people don't care and don't think elections matter so we've allowed an extremist minority to dominate, fueled by right-wing media propaganda.
To be fair, the other party that matters has dropped the ball on too many occasions, or been complicit, so there's some reason for all the apathy. That plus winner-takes all elections leaves a lot of people feeling like their vote doesn't matter.
They want to Marsform the Earth at any cost
Rogue nation.
North Korea behaves better.
The trump administration is anti science, anti anything that provides evidence for climate change. They’re obsessively pro fossil fuels and anti green anything.
What I’m “shocked” about is that this is news to anyone.
Let me guess, they want it privatized?
IIRC, Project 2025 argued that private companies provided more accurate weather forecasts, and thus one can just dismantle gov. agencies like NOAA and the market for such services will take care of itself.
project 2025 is also just about the wholesale destruction of the opposition, including academia.
From the playbook of COVID, it's not a problem if you just stop measuring.
Perhaps EU or China could build their own network of sensors to track this stuff? It's dangerous for so much science to be dependent on a country run by anti-science idiots.
I sincerely hope that China wins the AI race, for the sake of myself and my children. The Chinese Communist party might be evil, but at least they accept fundamental natural sciences, and are actively investing in technologies that help avoiding worst climate scenarios. Buying anything American instead of EU or Chinese alternatives has become deeply unethical to me.
>Perhaps EU or China could build their own network of sensors to track this stuff?
already do, the EU is in particular collects a ton of oceanographic data through for example the Copernicus Marine Service, but these particular sensors are in waters close to Oregon, Washington and Alaska, not really anything the EU or China could replace.
In its region the US is naturally not really replaceable, it's simply a big blow to research.
we seem to be doing some pretty cool science still. like invented AI
This must be publicized as much as possible to shame Trump and Vought.
What else can we say to stuff like this except fuck the United States?
Well we could try to Figure out the motives and justification, or we can just get mad and feel smug.
Here is what the National Science Foundation has to say about it:
> "The decision to de-scope aligns with NSF's wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart life cycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio."
Seems like even if we want to understand the justifications, the people making these decisions don't care to share them with us.
Wow that quote is the most useless bullshit bunch of words I've seen strung together recently. It says a whole lot of nothing in the most insulting way possible. Must have been written by a highly paid consultant.
> Must have been written by a highly paid consultant.
ChatGPT?
Fuck Trump and the slavering dolts who support him.
Speak with your money as much as you can.
Another project 2025 goal essentially, destruction of any real science that doesn't fit whatever "gold standard science" is.
https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...