1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Congress can stop this from happening . Please stand up for science and the funding already spent! Trump is ripping up $368 million worth of ocean sensors to blind America to climate change and the collapse of the Atlantic current. Congress funded it. Scientists built it. Trump is tearing it up anyway. The Trump administration is sending ships out in June to physically remove more than 900 deep-sea instruments from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that monitor things like ocean acidity and temperature — dismantling a $368 million monitoring network that took a decade to build and was designed to operate for 25 years. The Ocean Observatories Initiative is not redundant government bloat. It is the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observation system — monitoring greenhouse gas absorption, marine heat waves, commercial fisheries, coastal flooding along the East Coast, and most critically, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, the massive global conveyor belt of water that some scientists fear is weakening due to climate change. A collapse of that current would trigger severe weather catastrophes across multiple continents. The instruments measuring that current are anchored 9,200 feet below the surface of the Irminger Sea, between Greenland and Iceland, as part of an international scientific collaboration. They are now being pulled out of the water. The Trump administration tried to cut the network's funding by 80 percent — twice. Congress restored the money both times. So, the administration is simply dismantling it anyway. The annual operating cost was $48 million. That's less than four days of the Iran war. It's less than half what Trump is spending to gold-plate four horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial. "By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership," said Craig McLean, former acting chief scientist at NOAA. Scientists warn that decades of institutional knowledge and engineering expertise will be lost — Commercial fishing industries along the Pacific Northwest and Coastal communities will lose flood prediction tools. The entire planet will lose visibility into one of the most consequential ocean systems on Earth. Scientists call it what it is: willful blindness to climate catastrophe, funded by your tax dollars and executed against the explicit wishes of Congress. I urge you to stop the Trump admin from doing this !