Captain Eds make a living as a port pilot in Hawaii, climbing aboard the ships that arrive in the hours of Predagen and guiding them to the port.
His world revolves around the wind speeds, current force and waves. When ENSO is moving in dangerous waters in the dark, your cell phone is your life line: with some taps you can access the integrated ocean observation system and extract the necessary data to guide what are essentially safe warehouses safely to the dock.
But maybe not for much longer. President Donald Trump He wants to eliminate all federal funds for regional operations of the observation system. Scientists say that cuts could mean the end of efforts to collect crucial real -time data to navigate the update ports, plotting tsunami escape routes and predicting the intensity of hurricanes.
“It’s the last thing you should close,” said ENOS. “There is no money lost. Just at a time when we should get more money to do more work to benefit the public, they want to turn off things. That is the wrong strategy at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.”
The IOOS system was launched about 20 years ago. It is composed of 11 regional associations in multiple states and territories, including the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, the state of Washington, Michigan, South Carolina and South California.
Regional groups are networks of university researchers, conservation groups, companies and any other person who collects or uses maritime data. The associations are the Oceanography razor of the Swiss army, which use buoys, submersible drones and radar facilities to trace the water temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, wave speeds, wave heights and current resistance.
The networks monitor the great lakes, the American coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Alaska, the Caribbean and the South Pacific and loaded data from members to public websites in real time.
Cruise pilots, chargueros and piloters such as ENOS, as well as the US Navy and the Coast Guard, use the information directly to navigate the ports safely, draw courses around storms and perform search and rescue operations.
The observations of the associations feed the forecasts of the National Meteorological Service. The Pacific Northwest Association uses Tsunami data to publish coastal exhaust routes in real time in a public guidance application. And the Hawaii association not only publishes data that are useful to house pilots, but traces the intensity of hurricanes and tiger sharks that have been labeled for research.
The associations also track the toxic algae flowers, which can force beach closures and kill fish. Maps help commercial fishermen to avoid those empty regions. Water temperature data can help identify heat layers inside the ocean and, because it is more difficult for fish to survive in those layers, know that hot areas help fishermen attack better fishing fields.
Regional networks are not formal federal agencies, but they are almost completely financed through federal subsidies through the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration. The current federal budget allocates $ 43.5 million for networks. A republican bill in the Natural Resources Committee of the House of Representatives would actually send them more money, $ 56 million annually, from 2026 to 2030.
A memorandum of the Trump administration filtered in April proposes a cut of $ 2.5 billion for the Commerce Department, which Supervises NOAA, in the federal budget of 2026.
Part of the proposal requires eliminating federal funds for regional monitoring networks, although the memorandum says that one of the activities that the Administration wants the Commerce Department to concentrate is to collect oceanic and meteorological data.
The memorandum did not offer other justifications for the cuts. The proposal surprised network users.
“We have worked very hard to build an incredible system and is running without problems, providing important data for the economy. Why would you break it?” Jack Barth said, an oregon state oceographer who shares data with the Northwest Pacific Association.
“What we are providing is a window to the ocean and without those measures, frankly, we will not know what comes to us. It’s like turning off the headlights,” Barth said.
NOAA officials refused to comment on the cuts and possible impacts, saying in an email to Associated Press that does not do “speculative interviews.”
Nothing is safe. The federal fiscal year 2026 begins on October 1. The budget must approve the Chamber, the Senate and obtain the president’s signature before it can go into force. Legislators could decide to finance regional networks after all.
Network directors are trying not to panic. If the cuts are made, some associations can survive selling their data or requesting subsidies from sources outside the federal government. But the financing hole would be so significant that just keeping the lights on would be a uphill battle, they said.
If the associations bend, other entities could continue to collect data, but there will be gaps. The associations developed for years would evaporate and the data will not be available in one place as now, they said.
“People have come to us because we have been stable,” said the director of the Hawaii Regional Network, Melissa Iwamoto. “We are a known entity, a trust entity. No one saw this coming, the potential so that we are not here.”
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