US lawmakers fight Trump administration cuts to $386m ocean monitoring program: ‘supreme stupidity’

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, joins Democrats in bid to stop dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative

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A group of Democratic senators and one Republican, as well as two Democratic House committees, sent letters on Monday to the National Science Foundation asking it to reverse course on its plan to dismantle a sprawling ocean monitoring network, with House lawmakers going further and accusing the agency of acting illegally.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386m. Over the last decade it has tracked ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, climate change and extreme weather, producing data freely available to the public and informing more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run another 15 to 20 years.
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