Taxpayers spend roughly $43 million a year to fund inspections of animal breeders, animal exhibitors, animal transporters, dog importers, and horse shows under the Animal Welfare and Horse Protection Act, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. No one is howling.
The U.S. Department of War reports that it paid a company called Cash-Wa Distributing some $47 million for five years’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables to be delivered to schools and reservations in South Dakota and North Dakota.
And $48 million is the annual operating budget for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of some 900 deep-sea buoys and other instruments that monitor ocean currents and temperatures — and that the Trump administration plans to begin removing this month.
The National Science Foundation is the body that operates this ocean observatory network. A spokesman, when asked to answer the “But why?” question, cited a general need for the agency to create a “nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies.” That’s a pretty nifty example of meaningless double speak, if you ask us. He may as well have just come right out and said the quiet part out loud: That undertaking this massive effort to undermine ocean sciences is less about cost cutting and more about the culture wars.
Voters here on eastern Long Island — who generally have feelings and opinions about fisheries, coastal flooding, and weather patterns — might pause to consider the wisdom of the decision to dismantle the ocean-monitoring system. Anchoring the buoys was, according to scientists in the field, an engineering marvel with parallels to the space program (going down, rather than up), completed in 2016 at an already sunken cost of $368 million. It was expected to operate another 25 years. The buoys and sensors to be removed over a span of 15 months (and we wonder what that will cost?) are now found in the deep oceans off “Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea,” according to reporting this week in The New York Times.
Surprise, surprise: Scientists don’t think removing these buoys is either wise or a clever fiscal move. They think dismantling the deep-sea ocean observatory buoys is another strike by the Trump administration in its bizarre war on science. Tragically, killing off this ocean observatory network may end up damaging global efforts to protect sea life, with, obviously, a knock-on effect on the livelihoods of fishermen — as well as on the U.S.’s standing in the world as a leader of scientific advancement.
The decision to “descope” the ocean monitoring wasn’t made by the scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but was made by the National Science Foundation in response to the Trump administration’s proposed N.S.F. budget cuts and “strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment” (to quote the N.S.F.’s 2026 budget request, which asked Congress for $3.6 billion, with a “B”).
Don’t like it? It’s hard to know who to call. Right now, the N.S.F. appears to be operating without a head: The agency’s own website lists the roles of both director and deputy director as “vacant.”