The American National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on May 21 the dismantling of a sprawling network of 900 underwater sensors off the American coast, explains an article on the Gizmodo site. A new requirement from the Trump administration, even though the project had cost American taxpayers $368 million (317 million euros).
Why is it serious? First, because these underwater devices are essential for establishing temperature models and forecasts. Forecasts which are today the only way to anticipate the ravages of El Niño, this climatic phenomenon causing episodes of extreme heat and drought on the American coasts regularly. “This lack of information will become very disabling”worried oceanographer Ed Dever, who helped direct these sensors in the North Pacific, to the Associated Press.
The network of instruments notably includes an ocean observation device (OOI), a program that Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to eliminate since 2025, until finally succeeding this month. The OOI announced that it would remove one of the sensors on June 16 and estimates that the network will be completely destroyed by 2027.
The initiative has collected an immense amount of data from the seabed since its creation in 2015. Beyond predicting El Niño – which promises to be particularly violent this year – the device allows California to monitor tsunamis and earthquakes, and to identify waters with low oxygen levels, called “dead zones” and, more generally, to gather data inaccessible by satellites or any surface instrument. Everything had been designed so that the network would last between twenty-five and thirty years… but that was without counting on Donald Trump.
Precious money thrown away
The project is also a pillar of independent and collaborative scientific research on the issue of oceans on a global scale. The installation of a device at the bottom of the Irminger Sea, in the north of the Atlantic Ocean, was the result of an international effort to understand the slowdowns of certain currents due to climate change. These changes in currents could be the cause of an increase in extreme temperatures and cataclysmic natural disasters across the globe.
Faced with such challenges, the cost of maintaining the network is relatively low at $48 million per year (41.2 million euros), or 0.003% of the amount of optional government spending. A straw compared to what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would have spent in 2025 on lobster and other luxury items, all at the expense of the American taxpayer.
For its part, the Trump administration declared that the decision was part of a strategy aimed at “promote support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies”. In other words, the money will go to AI rather than to monitoring ocean currents.
“Forgoing a $368 million investment in a cutting-edge system, an engineering feat already funded by the American people, is short-sighted”indignant Chris Robbins, associate director of the NGO Ocean Conservancy, told the New York Times.
