'Good News, But It's a Low Bar': Trump Backtracks on Plan to Kill Ocean Monitoring Program

The Trump administration on Thursday backed off a widely criticized plan to dismantle a deep-sea monitoring system designed to provide crucial storm forecasting data while also tracking the health of coastal habitats and the impacts of the climate crisis on the world's oceans.

In an announcement posted on its website, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) said it "will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment" from the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), less than a month after it revealed plans to remove more than 900 instruments deployed along US coastlines.

NSF also said that it would continue planned maintenance operations on the remaining systems, while also creating plans to redeploy that Endurance Array, which is a set of long-term moorings set up in the Pacific Northwest, after it undergoes equipment servicing.

"NSF remains committed to ocean sciences," the announcement concluded, "to responsible stewardship of its research infrastructure and to supporting the stakeholders that depend on it."

The decision to end OOI drew bipartisan backlash in Congress, as the Republican-controlled US Senate on Wednesday passed a measure to block the administration from further removing ocean monitoring equipment.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who led the Senate effort to block the Trump administration's OOI plans alongside Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), described the removal of ocean monitoring systems as "supreme stupidity" that would destroy "a vital source of climate data."

The timing of NSF’s decision to dismantle the system was particularly controversial given concerns over planetary heating and the growing threat of extreme weather, especially as the return of El Niño this year is expected to unleash larger and more damaging meteorological events in the near future.

In response to Thursday's announcement, the Democratic National Committee’s Environment and Climate Council described the reversal on OOI as a rare sensible decision for a Trump administration that has been overtly hostile to climate science.

"Good news. But it's a low bar," the council wrote in a social media post. "Trump is backing off from doing something incredibly stupid, so we celebrate."