NSF

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GOOGLE STANFORD BRIN PAGE

GUK 6 26

In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability and marine biodiversity.

The notice, issued on 21 May, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF.

TRUMP TRIED TO CUT 2018, BACKLASH TACO, 2026? FIRED THE ENTIRE BOARD; NOTE PREZ ENVIR HIST 5 26 REAGAN CUT REGS, BUSH TRUMP CUT SCIENCE

2010–2019

President Obama requested $7.373 billion for fiscal year 2013.^[39] Due to the October 1, 2013 shutdown of the Federal Government, and NSF's lapse in funding, their website was down "until further notice", but was brought back online after the US government passed their budget. In 2014, NSF awarded rapid response grants to study a chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water of about 300,000 West Virginia residents.^[40]

In early 2018, it was announced that Trump would cut NSF Research Funding by 30% but quickly rescinded this due to backlash.^[41]

As of May 2018, Heather Wilson, the secretary of the Air Force, signed that letter of intent with the director of NSF initiating partnership for the research related to space operations and Geosciences, advanced material sciences, information and data sciences, and workforce and processes.^[42]

2020-Present

On April 28, 2026, President Donald Trump fired all 24 members of the foundation's governing board.^[43]

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bulwark 12 25 marc andreeson vc

even w oos tuition affordable state school? tuition, NSF paid to dev gui for browser; white greivance email rant ~ DEI BLM; wants to 86 nsf

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guk 6 26 Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’ | US news | The Guardian}:

Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’

Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions

Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by

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About this content

Karen McVeigh

Fri 5 Jun 2026

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), run by the US National Science Foundation, is a vast network of seafloor systems, underwater gliders and moored surface platforms that feeds data to researchers, policymakers, educators and mariners worldwide. The initiative, which covers both US coastlines and extends into the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, has been used to study marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, subduction zone earthquakes, ocean acidification and fisheries variability.

Dismantling it would remove a major component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a network of robotic floats, moored buoys and research vessels experts describe as the “eyes and ears” of the ocean. The warning systems based on the data, “save lives”, experts say.

Prescient research published in Nature Climate Change last month showed how data losses in GOOS, a UN-coordinated framework for ocean data for weather and climate collected by several countries, could degrade the ocean heat estimates that underpin weather prediction, El Niño forecasting and fisheries management. Losing US observations would be worse than randomly losing 80% of all ocean data worldwide, it found. US-funded platforms span every ocean basin, plugging critical gaps that no other nation currently fills.

Speich, a co-author of the research, said: “Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have – not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system”. Vertical temperature profiles that provide ocean heat content, are “amongst the simplest measurements we can make”, she said.

“Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole – they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop.

“Forecasts would continue – but they would degrade, sometimes dangerously so. Atmospheric observations alone are not sufficient” said Speich. “Ocean data [is] fundamental to early warning systems for tropical storms, cyclones and El Niño. And the consequences would not stop at science: the economic costs would be felt within the United States itself, from agriculture to insurance to disaster response.”

The loss of US observations, in a year predicted to be an El Niño year, with “supercharged” weather extremes, could also “lose the ability to see it coming clearly to act in time”, she said.

“The stakes are concrete: farmers in the US and across South America use El Niño forecasts to decide what to plant and when – whether to expect drought or flooding shapes every agricultural decision months in advance.”

The most recent El Niño, which hit in 2023-2024, was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to 2024’s record-breaking increase in global temperature.

Removing US observations alone would produce a 163% increase in error for annual ocean heating rates, the research by Speich and her co-authors found.

On Thursday, the European Union said it would boost its own monitoring of the world’s oceans by investing in a €92m ($107m) initiative called OceanEye, more than half of which will go to GOOS. The announcement, by the European Commission, was long-planned, not a direct response to the US move.

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, and co-author of the research paper, described the US administration’s move to dismantle the $368m OOI system as “penny-wise, pound foolish”.

“The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean” said Abraham. “We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US. ”

The US suffered more than 400 climate and weather disasters where damages exceeded or reached $1bn,between 1980 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the costs of such disasters amounted to $177bn. This “billion dollar climate and weather product”, managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer be updated due to “evolving priorities”, according to a note on its website.

The system, is, Abraham said is “quite an inexpensive way to reduce climate-related costs”.

“This is not about saving money, this is about killing climate science research,” Abraham said.

Samantha Burgess, the strategic climate lead at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union’s Earth observation system which integrates European space data with in-situ measurements to monitor changes and provide forecasts, said ocean observations are “irreplaceable” because “we can’t see the deep ocean from space.” They “save lives” by warning us of severe storms, she said.

Burgess said: “We need international cooperation to get the best available observations to mitigate risks in our changing world. Without ocean observations we are flying blind.”

A statement earlier this week by the National Science Foundation, which funds and oversees the OOI, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope”, or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.

ref guk

The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.

The notice, issued on 21 May, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF.

A statement by NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope”, or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.

The NSF’s notice described plans to remove “all in-water infrastructure” from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.

Some scientists expressed dismay at the plan, while Democratic lawmakers said they would fight it, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who called it a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less”, the New York Times reported.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”

Following the announcement, the OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring after the system first became operational in June 2016.

Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems”, Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”

The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in the Trump administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows Trump’s push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, a policy that has alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts.

Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed to the significance of the data that will be lost, particularly given the sophisticated engineering required to deploy and maintain the instruments.

“One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”

She said: “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time … the scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far … I’m really disappointed for the continuation of this important data set.”

Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.

“We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”

For Palevsky and her students, OOI data has helped shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration – the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored – as well as deep-ocean processes, marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Data from the OOI has also contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, with potentially severe consequences for the global climate.

“One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said.

“We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site,” she added.

For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world.

“As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.

In a statement to the Guardian, the NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely: “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

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new head, lamar smith on hunt

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9616370/science-committee-worse-benghazi-committee

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poison pill

guk ref 2

no lnx

ENVIRONMENT

JUL 25, 2023

Amid Heat Wave, GOP Adds Climate Denial To Spending Bills

House Republicans are helping their fossil fuel donors with legislative fine print that would block climate action.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook

David Sirota

House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, R-Texas, speaks with House Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

As scientists warn of a mass extinction and ecological tipping points, congressional Republicans are helping their fossil fuel industry donors by quietly inserting provisions into annual spending bills designed to bar the American government from combating and researching climate change, according to the fine print of legislative text reviewed by The Lever. Some provisions also require the leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas development, while potentially limiting such leases for wind power.

In all, Republican leaders have added at least a dozen such environmental provisions to four annual government spending bills as property damage and death tolls mount from historic heat waves, floods, and wildfires.

By adding the provisions to annual must-pass spending bills, Republicans who control the U.S. House are attempting to force Senate Democrats to choose between either accepting them or blocking the spending bills and shutting down the government.

For his part, President Joe Biden has declined to issue a climate emergency declaration, which could provide his administration new authority to circumvent at least some of the Republicans’ tactics.

The GOP bills are currently in the House Appropriations Committee, chaired by Texas RepublicanRep. Kay Granger, who has received nearly $1.2 million from the oil and gas sectorover the course of her career in Congress. Her second-largest career campaign contributor is the oil and gas industry, and she brags on her government website that she has fought to prevent spending to combat climate change.

Granger’s congressional district has been grappling with a heat-related public health crisis.

Blocking Fisheries Research As Oceans Boil

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One of the most aggressive Republican climate provisions moving through Granger’s panel is buried in legislation funding the government’s science agencies. As waters around South Florida set records for the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded, a line in the bill would bar the Biden administration from spending any money on “climate change fisheries research.”

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The move comes just weeks after tens of thousands of dead fish washed ashore in Texas due to high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, following other recent mass die-offs in Australia. The Center for Biological Diversity notes that intensifying ocean acidification triggered by climate change “could disrupt the entire marine ecosystem.”

The subcommittee that originally authored the fisheries legislation is headed by Republican Rep. Hal Rogers,who hails from the coal-rich state of Kentucky and whose top career campaign contributors include donors from the mining and fossil fuel industries.

Rogers has raised more than half a million dollars from the mining industry over the course of his career, and $390,000 from the oil and gas industry, according to data from OpenSecrets. In the 2019-2020 cycle, Rogers’s campaign paid $66,000 to his wife Cynthia.

The science funding bill also zeroes out funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program at the National Science Foundation, which coordinates research across the federal government “to understand the human-caused and natural processes that influence our planet,” and would additionally block the government from using any funds to carry out climate-related Biden executive orders.

https://downloads.globalchange.gov/ocp/ocp2023/Our-Changing-Planet_FY2023.pdf 66 pp

The bill targets a Biden order issued in January 2021 that directed the federal government to use the procurement process, in which it acquires goods and services from the private sector, to mitigate carbon emissions as part of a broader federal effort to address climate change.

The order also specifically directed the Commerce Department to “to collect input from fishermen, regional ocean councils, fishery management councils, scientists, and other stakeholders on how to make fisheries and protected resources more resilient to climate change, including changes in management and conservation measures, and improvements in science, monitoring, and cooperative research.”

The GOP legislation also moves to defund a separate Biden order from April 2022 that sought to enhance the federal government’s forest stewardship and promote “climate-smart stewardship of mature and old-growth forests.”

Requiring Offshore Oil/Gas Leases, Slowing Wind Power Leases

The Republican spending bills contain several more efforts to undermine the Biden administration’s ability to meaningfully respond to the worsening global climate crisis.

That includes the bill authorizing funding for the Department of Interior, which oversees public lands. The legislation contains a provision mandating, “None of the funds made available by this act may be used to consider or incorporate thesocial cost of carbon.” The bill also permanently rescinds $1.3 billion in grant funding under the Clean Air Act to mitigate the effects of air pollution, as more than a quarter of all Americans now live in areas with dangerous levels of such pollution.

The Interior spending bill also includes provisions requiring “the Secretary of the Interior to conduct quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales” as well as fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the bill report

At the same time, the legislation bars the government from issuing leases for offshore wind development in Florida until the completion of a study about windmills’ impact “on military readiness and training, marine environment and ecology, tourism, and other uses of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

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The latter rider is in response to Florida Republican lawmakers’ complaint that “people travel from around the world to see our pristine beaches — not windmills.”

The Department of Interior funding bill has been spearheaded by Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Id.), who has received nearly $900,000 in campaign contributions from electric utility interests during the course of his career, as well as roughly $440,000 from oil and gas industry donors. In the last few years, climate-intensified wildfires have caused billions of damage in Simpson’s state.

Defunding Global Climate Investments

Then there’s the bill funding the Department of State and foreign aid. That legislation would bar funding for theGreen Climate Fund— one of the entities charged with fulfilling the mandates of the Paris Climate Accords — which received a $1 billion deposit from the Biden administration in April.

Likewise, the bill prohibits the federal government from financing the Clean Technology Fund, which helps developing countries transition away from dirtier energy sources, and also explicitly rejects the concept of climate reparations, decreeing that none of the funds may be used “to pay compensation to any country, organization, or individual for loss and damages attributed to climate change.”

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The bill also prevents the funding of an August 2021 Department of Treasuring guidance calling on multilateral development banks like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to limit financing of fossil fuel projects.

The State Department and foreign aid bill is being overseen by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who has received nearly $430,000 in campaign contributions from the energy and natural resources industry during his time in office. His district includes locales that a recent climate study said are among the most likely to soon be underwater due to rising ocean levels.

The House bill for funding the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), meanwhile, seeks to bar the agency’s proposed climate disclosure rule, which would mandate that publicly traded companies provide a full disclosure of their climate risks.

The subcommittee overseeing the SEC bill is headed by Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) who has received more than $175,000 from oil and gas interests during his career. Womack’s home state has recently experienced deadly tornadoes and flash flood warnings.

Finally, the GOP bill funding the Department of Labor will maintain a ban from 1976 that has been reapproved annually under both Republican and Democratic control of Congress that bars the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from investigating deaths at farms that employ less than 10 people, including deaths related to extreme heat. (Due to mass automation in the agriculture industry, this exemption includes many farms that are quite large and profitable.)

While OSHA has yet to issue a standard governing excessive heat in the workplace, the agency is tasked with investigating deaths or injuries in cases of extreme heat. At least 436 people died from extreme heat on the job from 2011 to 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The OSHA bill originated in a subcommittee headed byRep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), whose top career campaign contributors include donors from agribusiness and the fossil fuel industry. Nearly a quarter of the Alabama labor force is outdoor workers, and the state recently experienced temperatures above 100 degrees.

The bills will now move to the full House for approval, and then the final bills must be negotiated with the Senate and passed again through both houses of Congress. If the provisions are kept in the text and Biden vetoes the spending bills, parts of the federal government could shut down.

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last? month, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted along party lines to cut funding allocations that enable NASA to study changing climate patterns through their Earth Science program. This week, House Republicans voted 217 to 205 to take a second swipe at the government-funded study of global warming, this time by seeking to impose regulations on how the National Science Foundation utilizes its money, via the pending America Competes Reauthorization Act.

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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/31/climate-change-to-make-it-off-broadway-debut-thanks-to-national-science/

fox bs

all it Climate Change: The Musical!

The National Science Foundation has spent nearly $700,000 on a climate change-themed theatrical production, leaving some in Congress questioning if the organization's grant funds could be put to better use.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, questioned White House science czar John Holdren in a hearing last Thursday about the way the NSF is using taxpayer money -- including on the grants for the play, a New York production called "The Great Immensity."

“I support basic research, which can lead to discoveries that change our world, expand our horizons and save lives,” Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee, told FoxNews.com. “But NSF has funded too many questionable research grants. Spending taxpayer dollars to fund a climate change musical called ‘The Great Immensity’ sounds more like a waste of taxpayer dollars -- money that could have funded higher priority research.”

“All government employees and their agency heads need to remember they are accountable to the American taxpayer who pays their salary and funds their projects. It is not the government's money; it is the people's money,” he added.

The play is being produced by New York-based activist theater group The Civilians with a grant award from 2010. According to a plot description on the theater company’s website, "The Great Immensity" focuses on a woman named Phyllis as she tries to track down a friend who disappeared while filming an assignment for a nature show on a tropical island. During her search, she also uncovers a devious plot surrounding an international climate summit in Auckland, New Zealand.

The description says the play is “a thrilling and timely production” that is “a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: how can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?”

Asked for comment by FoxNews.com, officials for the NSF confirmed they funded the play but defended the grant. “The Civilians, Inc., a Brooklyn, NY, theatre company, developed an innovative, out-of-the-box approach to exposing U.S. citizens to science,” the NSF said in a statement. “The project represents the unique cultural leverage of theater in its attempt to inspire the public’s imagination and curiosity about basic science and its relation to their everyday lives.” ...