During the Ford administration, Alan Greenspan was an economic adviser to the president. That’s when he invented the term “sideways waffling” to avoid saying the word “depression.” Today, the current administration is “sideways waffling” on climate science by adopting a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach that is dismantling Earth monitoring systems designed to provide the data we need to understand changes in the environment. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 A year ago, Michael Barnard reported on the parallels between the Cultural Revolution promoted by Mao Zedong that dismantled scientific research in China and what is happening in the US today. “The long-term impacts were severe. China’s scientific progress stagnated for years, creating a knowledge gap that took decades to recover from,” he wrote. “Both the 2025 Trump administration’s attacks on scientific funding and research freedoms and the Cultural Revolution share a common thread of ideological interference in academia. The Trump administration’s cuts to NASA, NOAA, and other research institutions so far represent a more bureaucratic form of suppression, targeting funding, and dismantling programs rather than physically persecuting scientists. “However, both cases reflect a distrust of intellectualism, a prioritization of political loyalty over expertise, and long term damage to national scientific progress. While China’s purge created a generational knowledge gap, the U.S. risks ceding global leadership in multiple areas of scientific research and climate science to other nations, likely echoing the stagnation China experienced post-1976.” Descoping OOI This week, the US government took another step in its campaign to bulldoze climate science. The National Science Foundation announced on May 21, 2026, that it has “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative,” a vast ocean observation network that comprises more than 900 instruments deployed throughout the world’s oceans that collect data on ocean health. The OOI system has provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change for more than a decade, including data about current patterns, climate variability, and marine biodiversity. So what does “descoping” mean, exactly? It means the administration wants to bamboozle us into thinking it is continuing ocean research when it is doing exactly the opposite and hoping people won’t notice. The announcement came just a few days after the entire independent board that oversees the NSF was fired. The “descoping” will remove all the ocean monitoring equipment currently deployed off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland. OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF plan will see a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process that is expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” he said. Well, duh, Jim. Why not remove radar from the FAA traffic control system? Who needs sensors? Why not make pilots do their job instead of relying on the federal government to do it for them? Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems,” Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students, and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.” Translation: Who cares if your data gets old? We don’t pay any attention to it anyway, so why waste taxpayer money to collect it? Marginalizing Science The Guardian reports that the scientific community has been blindsided by the announcement. Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed out the OOI system relies on sophisticated engineering to create and maintain instruments that collect the data. “One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves. Being able to have instruments, both floating on the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface,” is vital to the research she and other scientists are doing. “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time. The scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far. “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it, and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself. We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off,” she said. AMOC Science In Danger Data from the OOI has contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought — with potentially severe consequences for the global climate. “One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said. The OOI data has shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration. “We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site.” For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world. “As we reduce the amount of data that we have … it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said. MAGA Double Speak In a statement to The Guardian, NSF head of media affairs Mike England said the program was not being cancelled entirely. “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” No, Mike, that is not true. The plan is to do away with science as a favor to the fossil fuel industry, which has been trying to muzzle climate scientists for half a century. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland called descoping a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more, not less.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island posted on the internet sewer known as X, “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.” Mandated Ignorance The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in this administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows the so-called president’s push to expand deep sea mining and loosen fishing regulations — policies that have alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts, The Guardian said. Mao Zedong made scientists and educators pariahs in Chinese society for more than 20 years, and that country is still suffering from the after-effects. It was not until the end of the last century that China elected to prioritize science and education again. Today, it is a world leader in clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced computer technology. The US is following the Mao playbook, which will have identical results. Anybody with the intellect of a hothouse tomato — and every Republican member of Congress — should be able to see what dismantling OOI will do. The lights are going out all across America. We wonder if they will ever come back on.
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