1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Stop the dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The NSF has begun pulling more than 900 deep-sea instruments from four of the OOI's five deployed arrays — the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance, and Pioneer Arrays — cutting short a program designed to run 25 years. The FY2026 budget proposes slashing OOI funding by 80 percent. That's not a "transition to a nimbler approach." That's destruction of irreplaceable infrastructure. The data being lost matters in concrete ways. The Coastal Endurance Array off Oregon and Washington supports fisheries responsible for roughly a quarter of the global annual fish catch. The Irminger Sea station monitors the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, whose potential collapse could trigger catastrophic weather disruptions across the Northern Hemisphere. This is continuous, real-time data that simply cannot be reconstructed once the instruments are gone. Block this defunding. Demand that NSF halt the removal of in-water infrastructure and restore full OOI funding. The ocean doesn't pause while we debate budget priorities — and neither should our ability to monitor it.