Democrats said Tuesday they intend to fight the Trump administration’s plan to eradicate a deep-ocean observation system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems.
The system cost $368 million when it was installed in 2016 but now officials want to shut it down, which they say would save $48 million in operating costs each year.
The National Science Foundation declined to say how much it would cost to remove more than 900 remote ocean instruments that are anchored to the ocean bottom in far-flung locations, including in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.
The agency will begin sending ships to begin pulling up the instruments later this month, a process that is expected to take about 15 months. The ocean observation system was designed to operate for at least 25 years, meaning the decision would result in the loss of more than a decade of data.
Lawmakers accused the administration of wasting tax dollars in its bid to cripple climate science, which President Trump has derided. They said eliminating the observation system would harm coastal communities that benefit from scientists who use the data to study coastal currents that influence the weather and commercial fisheries along the East Coast.
“For our watermen and farmers and our costal community residents and businesses, changes in currents and flooding have a major impact on their lives and livelihoods,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in a statement.
“Defunding a program that helps researchers and scientists track these conditions is shortsighted and, ultimately, will end up costing American taxpayers more not less,” he said. Mr. Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the National Science Foundation, said he would be “fighting back.”
Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, called the decision “a continuation of the administration’s war on science,” adding that the administration is eliminating a program that Congress has expressly supported for years.
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to shut down the ocean observation system, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Each time, Congress pushed back, restoring the money. As a share of federal discretionary spending, which totals more than $1.6 trillion this year, the program’s annual operating costs are minuscule.
“The Trump administration thinks that burying the data will help them kill our momentum to take climate action,” Mr. Markey said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Scientists and environmental advocates criticized the decision to dismantle the ocean work.
“Walking away from a $368-million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic,” said Chris Robbins, the associate director of scientific initiatives for Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group.
Ending the ocean observation system aligns with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has forecast much of Mr. Trump’s agenda and criticized federal science for focusing too much federal science funding on climate change. Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, also has tried to dismantle much of the government’s ability to monitor rising greenhouse gas emissions and study the effects of rising global temperatures on American communities.
There has been pushback. On Monday, a federal judge thwarted a plan by the administration to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the world-leading climate research lab based in Colorado. And Congress has refused to go along with the White House’s effort to eliminate the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a move that would mean dropping research on climate and weather patterns.
Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said in a statement that the agency is not canceling the umbrella deep-sea program, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative.
He said the move to remove the observation system “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies.”
