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This story has been updated with a response from Sen. Dan Sullivan’s office on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at 3:02 p.m.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is among several members of Congress trying to prevent the National Science Foundation from dismantling portions of an instrument system that monitors the nation’s oceans.

The National Science Foundation plans to pull out much of the instrumentation in the Ocean Observatories Initiative system, which began operating in 2016 and was intended to last for three decades.

The system has more than 900 instruments that track ocean conditions, including circulation and currents, temperature, marine life, weather events and data used to manage seafood harvests. Under the Trump administration, the National Science Foundation plans in the coming year to remove instruments from the waters off Alaska, as well as Washington state, Oregon, North Carolina and Greenland. The first removal is scheduled for Tuesday in waters off Oregon.

In a letter sent Monday to Acting NSF Director Brian Stone, Murkowski and nine other senators urged the agency to reverse the decision.

“Eliminating most of this complex ocean monitoring system threatens the safety of our coastal communities while undermining our nation’s ability to monitor coastal environments, marine currents, and extreme weather events,” they wrote.

The system is especially important this year because of the powerful El Nino system that is developing in the Pacific Ocean and is poised to disrupt widespread weather patterns, the letter said. “The OOI system delivers crucial information about our ocean patterns and weather, reaching and touching all Americans. The effort to dismantle this vital network, jeopardizing decades of prior research, must be reversed in order to prioritize public safety,” the letter said.

The system is also of particular importance to Alaska’s multibillion-dollar fishing industry, which has objected to the NSF move.

A separate letter to Stone from 25 U.S. House Democrats called the decision “absurd.”

“This decision means that instead of paying for the valuable insights that can be gleaned from the 10-years-and-counting continuous monitoring, taxpayers are now paying for research vessels to span the ocean dredging up hundreds of pieces of instrumentation,” they wrote. “This is pathetic. In a time of strained resources, the NSF is wasting time and money to destroy its own scientific infrastructure.”

Murkowski was the only Republican to sign either letter. 

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, is paying attention to the issue, spokesperson Amanda Coyne said on Tuesday. “Senator Sullivan has concerns about the dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). He will be meeting with the Acting Director of the NSF tomorrow to raise those concerns,” she said by email.

Spokespeople for the other member of Alaska’s congressional delegation, Republican Rep. Nick Begich, did not respond by midday Tuesday to an emailed query sent Monday.

A spokesperson for the National Science Foundation defended the changes as a “descoping” rather than a dismantling of the system. Descoping is a business neologism that usually refers to a reduction in the scope of a project or a weakening of a project’s objectives.

The system is not being canceled, the spokesperson said in an emailed message. “All previously collected OOI data will remain accessible through the OOI Data Center. 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,” the spokesperson said.

The decision to pull out ocean sensors is in line with other Trump administration policies and with the plans for ocean science described in Project 2025, a report issued in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation that was seen as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. Russell Vought, the prime author of Project 2025, is now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Project 2025 called for the dismantling of NOAA’s science operations, describing the agency as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” Deep cuts to NOAA orchestrated by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have already affected fishery management.

As for the National Science Foundation, the Trump administration is proposing a 55% funding cut for the coming fiscal year. That is on top of deep cuts made last year that resulted in mass firings and cancellation of more than 1,000 grants, most of them aimed at education.

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Alaska media coverage of a highly touted and long anticipated “connector trail” in downtown Anchorage has produced a series of “feel good” stories that sing the praises of a project widely considered to be a dream come true—at least by its backers. Those include a high-powered coalition of local recreational trail advocates and elected officials at both the city and state levels.  

In the words of Anchorage Park Foundation executive director Beth Nordlund, the new trail segment is “a big community accomplishment. . . . There’s really something to celebrate here.”

Articles in the Alaska Beacon, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Public Media and Alaska’s News Source have focused on that celebration while extolling the connector’s significance.

About 1.3 miles long, this small trail segment will join the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail and Ship Creek Trail when finished in 2027, if all goes according to plan. Not only will the connector add a final piece to Anchorage’s popular 32-mile “Moose Loop,” it will also be an important piece of the much grander “Alaska Long Trail,” which is actually a network of multipurpose trails that when finally complete will stretch some 500 miles from Seward to Fairbanks and, along the way, pass through Anchorage. This “dream trail,” as Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance calls it, is expected to be a world-class pathway that rivals the famed Appalachian and Pacific Coast Trails.

All of this had the connector trail’s boosters in an excited frenzy at a ground-breaking ceremony in May. The media coverage reflected that.

But there’s a part of this story that no one in the media seems to have questioned: the price.

Connector-trail articles in local media put the price tag of this 1.3-mile segment at somewhere between $15.6 and $19 million.

YIKES was my first thought when seeing that cost estimate. Can that be true? More than $15 million for a bit more than one mile of trail? That kind of funding seems not only extravagant, but as one local letter-writer to the ADN noted, “From the outside, it appears completely fiscally irresponsible. Please help me to understand this.”

Like that letter writer, I would appreciate an explanation for what appears to be hugely excessive government spending, the majority of it state and federal funding according to media coverage, but some of it also local money.

So far, I have not seen or heard any such justification.

It is true that the connector-trail project will include a cultural “plaza” and public art installation dedicated to the Dena’ina Athabascan people who lived here long before the community of Anchorage was settled.

I’m all for that. But $15.6 million?

One reason this bothers me so much is that Anchorage has a world-class “backyard wilderness,” Chugach State Park, that is chronically underfunded and understaffed. The same Alaska Legislature that is so excited about the Alaska Long Trail has failed for decades to adequately fund the upkeep of trails and other facilities in Chugach State Park, nor has it provided enough money for a fully functioning staff.

This negligence is a long-running disgrace, as is the pittance of money annually appropriated to the entire Alaska State Parks system.

That Anchorage legislators—including some I normally support and admire—so loudly and proudly celebrate the Alaska Long Trail and its new connector trail while failing to give equal voice to Anchorage’s shamefully neglected backyard wilderness and other state parks is both maddening and disheartening to me.

Perhaps it’s simply one more example of our state’s unhealthy obsession with grandiose megaprojects, with the connector trail and its lavish funding being a symbol of that.

There’s also this to consider: millions of dollars will be spent on this short trail segment and its associated plaza, during a time when all sorts of social and cultural needs, including affordable housing, are being insufficiently addressed here in Anchorage.

No doubt some will argue that different “pots” of money are involved. I say that’s an excuse, not an explanation. Both locally and at a state level, our leaders need to reconsider their priorities.

But this Alaskan wants to know why we are spending $15.6 million for a small trail project, when there are so many other needs.

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