Leading into this week, the second Trump Administration's campaign against federal climate action appeared all but unstoppable. An April budget proposal from the White House called for further cuts to the already-beleaguered staff of environmental agencies, followed by a decision in May to delay the phaseout of greenhouse gases from refrigeration. Then came the announcement earlier this month that the National Science Foundation would terminate the Ocean Observation Initiative (OOI), a $365 million nationwide program that provides essential climate data from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
But with the ocean monitoring program, Trump seems to have found the limit for how far some Congressional Republicans will allow the executive to go in eradicating climate research.
This week, a bipartisan group passed a bill in the U.S. Senate to block the federal government’s ability to spend federal funds on disarticulating the Ocean Observation Initiative.
The Saving the OOI Act of 2026, co-authored by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, is the first time in the second Trump Administration that the ever-elusive “political will” to protect even modest climate measures has emerged from Congress.
This may come as cold comfort to those who have stomached the Trump Administration’s energetic targeting of anything resembling climate policy. The nominally bipartisan bill counts Murkowski as the lone Republican supporter, and the bill ultimately passed by voice vote, obscuring the true number of Republicans who may have harbored concerns about cutting the ocean research program.
So while it may be early to say that a climate coalition has taken shape to push back against the Trump Administration, it’s worth wondering: why this time? What prompted a bipartisan Congressional group to stand up in a way that it notably has not for previous cuts to the critical infrastructure of climate research?
And if there isn’t a formal coalition to protect climate research taking shape just yet, does the successful effort to save the OOI reveal something about the political limits of the administration's campaign against climate science?
The Ocean Observatories Initiative
When the National Science Foundation announced the OOI’s elimination in early June, researchers and investigators largely reacted with dismay. Taking OOI’s data out of global climate analysis would rob researchers of the world’s most granular ocean data that had become essential to modern climate models.
That’s because climate change is having a number of serious, and interconnected, impacts on the world’s oceans, and the OOI measures virtually all of them. The project counts more than 900 deep-sea instruments off the shores of Alaska, Oregon, North Carolina, Washington State and the Irminger Sea, off the coast of Trump’s erstwhile colonial obsession of Greenland. The project kept a decade of data on the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon, how ocean temperatures affect fish populations, as well as forecasting how coastal flooding along the East Coast is playing out in real time.
Impact on the Ground & NCAR
Then there’s the impact for the communities who depend on the climate programs targeted by the proposed cuts. Unlike other climate research centers that have found themselves in the Trump Administration’s crosshairs, the Ocean Observatory Initiative is not a single research center. The OOI is a network of research hubs and nodes across the country, including in states that went to Trump in 2024, such as Alaska and North Carolina.
Early reporting from Alaska suggested that the fishing industry in particular viewed the potential absence of OOI as disastrous for industry already learning to grapple with climate impacts. As Michelle Stratton, executive director of the Alaska Marine Community Coalition told Inside Climate News: “We’re in the middle of salmon crashes, crab collapses and repeated marine heatwaves, and this decision takes away the data we rely on to understand what’s happening and how to manage these fisheries.”
No such political salvation came for the National Center on Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Last December, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that it would move to break up the NCAR, a climate research center that OMB Director Russell Vought characterized as "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
The federal government’s move to shut NCAR appears to have been motivated more by a mafia-style shakedown of Democratic politicians than an ideological posture. Early reporting suggested that NCAR was targeted because of Colorado Governor Jared Polis’ refusal to commute the sentence of former election clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted in Colorado State Court of attempting to influence election results in favor of Trump in 2020. That prompted one Trump official to state on the record that if Colorado Governor Jared Polis wanted NCAR to stay open he should have been more open to “cooperation” with the Trump Administration.
Polis ultimately did commute Peters’ sentence, although the Trump Administration did not reciprocate by dropping its action against NCAR. By that time, federal agents had physically moved NCAR’s supercomputing infrastructure to a different facility, a move ultimately overturned by courts early this month.
Not Just the Courts
Until now, the only meaningful resistance to the Trump Administration’s deepest cuts to federal climate initiatives has come from the courts. Democratic state attorneys general have delivered some important victories, including this week when the Trump Administration dropped its appeal against a December ruling that found an executive order freezing federal permitting on wind and solar projects.
Even successful court action against the Trump Administrations’ moves against climate action have yielded unintended consequences. Wind and solar developers have logged a string of legal victories against the White House’s attempts to shutter renewables projects under construction. The Trump Administration has since switched tactics, opting for extraordinary payouts of taxpayer money for developers to stop construction of grid-ready wind and solar projects.
Conclusion
The White House’s quick retreat does suggest something ironic about its plans to dismantle what it views as institutional “climate alarmism”. If environmental policy is vulnerable because it’s too small and invisible to garner national news attention, then perhaps it is also too small to make it worth a fight with the Senate. The Trump Administration, or at least the contingent of Trump operatives in charge of the National Science Foundation, have apparently calculated that cutting climate programs is not worth the expenditure of political capital against fellow Republicans, including a veteran Trump dissenter like Lisa Murkowski.
Political and ideological considerations aside, the Trump Administration may also be waking up to the fact that the major government expenditures populating DOGE spreadsheets are generally not frittered away on masses of un-downloaded reports, and indeed very often support American jobs and communities. A straightforward explanation to the OOI and NCAR cuts would seem to be that this is the government that DOGE created. While Elon Musk is long gone from the White House, having made his exit literally with a black eye, the lasting effect of DOGE was to create a permission structure for cutting programs without triggering meaningful constituent backlash.
While the future for protecting climate action stateside may still be taking shape, perhaps the silver lining to the OOI episode lies in its unintended consequences. Earlier this month, the European Union announced its OceanEye project to pick up the baton from OOI. Much like the resurgence of renewables in reaction to the War in Iran, the end result of cutting OOI may prove to be a global ocean data system that is stronger than it began.
