By WILL WEISSERT

WASHINGTON (AP) — For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected, from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.

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Now, the Trump administration is scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable.

It has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view the government-slashing efforts of Elon Musk’s team and other key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps such as Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for recordkeeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership and even ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

All of that follows President Donald Trump discouraging note-taking at meetings, ripping up records when he was done with them, refusing to release White House visitor logs and having staffers sign nondisclosure agreements during his first term — then being indicted for hauling to Florida boxes of sensitive documents that he was legally required to relinquish.

To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that Trump’s presidency will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any before it and that what is authorized for public release will be sanitized and edited to reinforce a carefully sculpted image the president wants projected, even if the facts don’t back that up.

How will experts and their fellow Americans understand what went on during Trump’s term when those charged with setting aside the artifacts documenting history refuse to do so?

How to piece together a history of truth and accuracy?

The administration says it’s the “most transparent in history,” citing the Republican president’s penchant for taking questions from reporters nearly every day.

But flooding the airwaves, media outlets and the internet with all things Trump isn’t the same as keeping records that document the inner workings of an administration, historians caution. That’s especially true given the president’s propensity for exaggerating, particularly when it comes to bolstering his own image and accomplishments.

“He thinks he controls history,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian who served as founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. “He wants to control what Americans ultimately find out about the truth of his administration, and that’s dangerous. Because, if he believes that he can control that truth, he may believe that there is nothing that he can do that would have consequences.”

Watchdog groups are most immediately worried about what the administration is doing in real time with little oversight or accountability. They point to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and other top officials seeking to obscure sweeping efforts to remake government, the economy and large swaths of the nation’s civil and cultural fabric.

“With this administration’s history of tearing up records, storing them in unsecured facilities in Florida, its use of Signal,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, which has sued DOGE seeking greater access to records. “At that point, there are a lot of questions about how’s DOGE operating, and is it operating within the law?”

Trump has made concealing even basic facts part of his political persona.

He long refused to release his tax returns despite every other major White House candidate and president having done so since Jimmy Carter. Today, White House stenographers still record every word Trump utters, but many of their transcriptions are languishing in the White House press office without authorization for public release. That means no official record — for weeks, if at all — of what the president has said.

“You want to have a record because that’s how you ensure accountability,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Virginia. “You can’t hold people accountable if you don’t actually know what happened.”

The law says Trump must maintain records

Presidents are legally obligated to keep up the historical record. After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in 1974, he tried to take documents home to California. Congress approved a law requiring document preservation that applied only to Nixon.

Four years later, the Presidential Records Act extended similar rules to all commanders in chief. It mandates the preservation, forever, of White House and vice presidential documents and communications. It deems them the property of the U.S. government and directs the National Archives and Records Administration to administer them after a president’s term.

A separate measure, the Federal Records Act of 1950, is meant to safeguard for the historical record the actions of other officials. It says their communications should be preserved, sent to the National Archives, whose headquarters is down the street from the White House, and are generally subject to requests for information under Freedom of Information Act.

The Presidential Records Act affords presidents the exclusive responsibility for the custody and management of their records while in office, and says the National Archives plays no role except when a president wants to dispose of such materials.

Further, it protects some presidential records from Freedom of Information requests for five years after a president leaves office, and can even block release of some records for up to a dozen years after a president’s term is up. Presidents also can evoke executive privilege to further limit certain types of communication from release.

Once an administration is over, however, there are rules about what even the president must retain for the public. The Presidential Records Act also prohibits presidents from taking records home.

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (Justice Department via AP)

That’s best evidenced by Trump’s 2022 federal indictment for mishandling classified documents. Rather than turn them over the National Archives, Trump hauled boxes of potentially sensitive documents from his first term to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where they ended piled up in his bedroom, a ballroom and even a bathroom and shower. The FBI raided the property to recover them. The case was later thrown out, though, and then abandoned altogether after Trump won back the White House last November.

Trudy Huskamp Peterson, acting Archivist of the United States from 1993 to 1995, said keeping such records for the public is important because “decision-making always involves conflicting views, and it’s really important to get that internal documentation to see what the arguments were.”

Early presidents often sought to preserve their place in history

The push toward preservation of the historical record predates Nixon and even the United States itself.

American colonists decried the secrecy around the British Parliament, leading early leaders to install transparency safeguards, including initially rejecting the notion of a presidential Cabinet at the Constitutional Convention. Instead, they endorsed requirements that the president receive advice in writing from department secretaries, so that there would be a written record, said Chervinsky, also author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.”

In 1796, Washington asserted what today might be called executive privilege, arguing that some diplomatic conversations had to be private given their sensitive nature. But the following year, the nation’s first president wrote about the need to build a library to house his papers for historians and researchers, Chervinsky said.

Many early presidents kept meticulous records, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom wanted to “be seen as a positive figure in history,” Chervinsky said. Others, like Abraham Lincoln, had advisers who understood the importance of the era and documented history carefully.

Other presidents often did not prioritize recordkeeping.

Ulysses S. Grant, who left office in 1877, famously wrote, “The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket, or the hands of a clerk more careful than myself.” And it wasn’t until 2014 when the Library of Congress, finally clear of legal battles that raged 50 years earlier with Warren G. Harding’s family, released correspondence between the 29th president and his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips.

Federally authorized presidential libraries did not exist until 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his while still in office, although a mostly privately funded library established for Rutherford B. Hayes, who left the presidency in 1881, served as a model. Roosevelt also installed a White House tape recorder to capture conversations, a practice that mostly continued until Nixon’s Oval Office tapes upended his presidency.

After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, many of his presidential recordings were taken by his family and National Archives officials had to negotiate with Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., for public access, Peterson said. President Lyndon B. Johnson recorded phone calls that have informed historians for decades, including his 1964 lament about the Vietnam War: “It just worries the hell out of me.”

Naftali said that in his role at the Nixon library, he saw drafts materials — and the notes used to compile them — that survived among presidential papers, even when the finished documents were shredded in Watergate cover-up efforts.

“You should want accountability whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or an independent,” Naftali said. “You want to know what people did in your name.”

Presidential clashes with archivists predate Trump

Even after new laws saw Nixon’s White House tapes turned over to authorities, it fell to archivists to separate official and political material from the personal, which was potentially subject to more privacy protections. They also had to deal with voice-activated devices clicking on while Oval Office cleaning crews worked.

More recently, President George H.W. Bush’s administration destroyed some informal notes, visitor logs and emails. After President Bill Clinton left office, his former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, pleaded guilty to taking copies of a document about terrorist threats from the National Archives by stuffing them down his pants leg.

President George W. Bush’s administration disabled automatic archiving for some official emails, encouraged some staffers to use private email accounts outside their work addresses and lost 22 million emails that were supposed to have been archived, though they were eventually uncovered in 2009.

The younger Bush also signed an executive order seeking to limit the scope of the Presidential Records Act for himself and past presidents. His successor, President Barack Obama, rescinded that. Obama’s administration nonetheless moved to block release of White House visitor logs, something Trump continued in his first term.

Congress updated the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act in 2014 to encompass electronic messaging, including commercial email services known to be used by government employees to conduct official business. But back then, use of auto-delete apps like Signal was far less common.

“A decade ago, we were still in a Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL world,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives. “The point is, it’s far easier to copy — or forward — a commercial email to a dot-gov address to be preserved, than it is to screenshot a series of messages on an app like Signal.”

Further complicating matters is Trump’s routinely answering cellphone calls, including from reporters. Guidance dating back decades suggests documenting, through ordinary note-taking, the substance of conversations where significant decisions are made, Baron said.

But he also noted that the rules are less clear than those around written communications, including texts. Such communications have already been at the center of advocates’ work to preserve records around DOGE’s work.

The administration has argued DOGE’s efforts are subject to the Presidential Records Act which would potentially shield it from Freedom of Information Act rules. Amey’s Project on Government Oversight sued, maintaining that Musk’s initiative should be covered by the Federal Records Act.

Other advocacy groups have also sued DOGE over compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests, prompting the administration to file a one-page record retention policy in March that was revealed in court filings. It requires DOGE staffers to preserve all work-related communications and records, regardless of format — which, if applied completely across the board, would include apps like Signal.

Relying on ‘an honor system’

There were efforts during the first Trump administration to safeguard transparency, including a memo issued through the Office of White House counsel Don McGahn in February 2017 that reminded White House personnel of the necessity to preserve and maintain presidential records.

FILE – A letter from acting archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall to former President Donald Trump’s legal team is photographed, Aug. 23, 2022. The letter details that the National Archives recovered 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier in 2022. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)

Trump’s 2017-2021 administration also established a system to capture messages the president posted to Twitter even after he deleted them.

When Trump frequently ripped up briefing papers and other documents when he was finished with them during his first term, record analysts working across the street from the White House later would gather them up and tape them back together as best they could.

Experts and advocates say no such guidance memo has been issued from the White House this time, though William Fischer, the National Archives acting chief records officer, released a memo this month reminding agencies about rules for maintaining federal records created on apps such as Signal and recommending using “automated tools to comply” with the Federal Records Act.

Trump has recently talked about his place in history, and officials around the president have discussed building a presidential library — potentially in Florida — when he leaves the White House for good. But Trump also long exaggerated his right to keep documents for personal use rather than turn them over to archivists.

“Under the Presidential Records Act, I’m allowed to do all this,” Trump wrote on his social media site in June 2023 after the FBI seized boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago — an assertion the indictment against him disputed.

The White House says Trump was “unjustly prosecuted” on “fake charges” during that case. It points to having recently ordered the declassification of bevies of historical files, including records related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King.

The administration says it fulfilled records requests from Congress that the administration of his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, ignored, and offered instructions that federal agencies should clear out backlogged Freedom of Information Act requests.

It says it ended the Biden-era practice of staffers using Microsoft Teams, where chats were not captured by White House systems. The Biden administration had more than 800 users on Teams, meaning an unknown number of presidential records might have been lost, Trump officials now say, though that is something Biden representatives did not confirm.

But the White House did not answer questions about the possibly of drafting a new memo on record retention like McGahn’s from 2017. Nor did it comment about whether nondisclosure agreements remain in use for White House staffers this term, or speak to Trump’s past habit of tearing up documents.

Chervinsky, of the George Washington Presidential Library, said Congress, the courts and even the public often don’t have the bandwidth to ensure records retention laws are enforced, meaning, “A lot of it is still, I think, an honor system.”

“There aren’t that many people who are practicing oversight,” she said. “So, a lot of it does require people acting in good faith and using the operating systems that they’re supposed to use, and using the filing systems they’re supposed to use.”

Angered by the role the National Archives played in his documents case, meanwhile, Trump fired the ostensibly independent agency’s head, Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as her acting replacement.

Peterson, the former acting national archivist, said she still believes key information about the Trump administration will eventually emerge, but “I don’t know how soon.”

“Ultimately things come out,” she said. “That’s just the way the world works.”

Will Weissert covers the White House for The Associated Press.

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to strip legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to deportation.

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The court’s order, with only one noted dissent, puts on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month. The justices provided no rationale, which is common in emergency appeals.

The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.

A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request to put the order on hold while the lawsuit continues.

The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals President Donald Trump’s administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration. Last week, the government asked the court to allow it to end humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, setting them up for potential deportation as well.

The high court also has been involved in legal battles over Trump’s efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.

The administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending the temporary protected status for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. That status is granted in 18-month increments.

The protections had been set to expire April 7, but U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ordered a pause on those plans. He found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.

Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.

But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.

In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”

Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she would have rejected the administration’s emergency appeal.

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

DENVER (AP) — Tucked deep in the thousand-plus pages of the multitrillion-dollar budget bill making its way through the Republican-controlled U.S. House is a paragraph curtailing a court’s greatest tool for forcing the government to obey its rulings: the power to enforce contempt findings.

It’s unclear whether the bill can pass the House in its current form — it failed in a committee vote Friday — whether the U.S. Senate would preserve the contempt provision or whether courts would uphold it. But the fact that GOP lawmakers are including it shows how much those in power in the nation’s capital are thinking about the consequences of defying judges as the battle between the Trump administration and the courts escalates.

Republican President Donald Trump raised the stakes again Friday when he attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for its ruling barring his administration from quickly resuming deportations under an 18th-century wartime law: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” Trump posted on his social media network, Truth Social.

Trump vs. the district courts

The most intense skirmishes have come in the lower courts.

One federal judge has found that members of the administration may be liable for contempt after ignoring his order to turn around planes deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump’s administration has scoffed at another judge’s ruling that it “facilitate” the return of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, even though the Supreme Court upheld that decision.

In other cases, the administration has removed immigrants against court orders or had judges find that the administration is not complying with their directives. Dan Bongino, now Trump’s deputy director of the FBI, called on the president to “ignore” a judge’s order in one of Bongino’s final appearances on his talk radio show in February.

“Who’s going to arrest him? The marshals?” Bongino asked, naming the agency that enforces federal judges’ criminal contempt orders. “You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? Department of Justice.”

Administration walking ‘close to the line’

The rhetoric obscures the fact that the administration has complied with the vast majority of court rulings against it, many of them related to Trump’s executive orders. Trump has said multiple times he will comply with orders, even as he attacks by name judges who rule against him.

While skirmishes over whether the federal government is complying with court orders are not unusual, it’s the intensity of the Trump administration’s pushback that is, legal experts say.

“It seems to me they are walking as close to the line as they can, and even stepping over it, in an effort to see how much they can get away with,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor. “It’s what you would expect from a very clever and mischievous child.”

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Mike Davis, whose Article III Project pushes for pro-Trump judicial appointments, predicted that Trump will prevail over what he sees as hostile judges.

“The more they do this, the more it’s going to anger the American people, and the chief justice is going to follow the politics on this like he always does,” Davis said.

The clash was the subtext of an unusual Supreme Court session Thursday, the day before the ruling that angered the president. His administration was seeking to stop lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions barring its initiatives. Previous administrations have also chafed against national orders, and multiple Supreme Court justices have expressed concern that they are overused.

Still, at one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer over his assertion that the administration would not necessarily obey a ruling from an appeals court.

“Really?” asked Barrett, who was nominated to the court by Trump.

Sauer contended that was standard Department of Justice policy and he assured the nation’s highest court the administration would honor its rulings.

‘He’s NOT coming back’

Some justices have expressed alarm about whether the administration respects the rule of law.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, both nominated by Democratic presidents, have warned about government disobedience of court orders and threats toward judges. Chief Justice John Roberts, nominated by a Republican president, George W. Bush, issued a statement condemning Trump’s push to impeach James E. Boasberg, the federal judge who found probable cause that the administration committed contempt by ignoring his order on deportations.

Even after the Supreme Court upheld a Maryland judge’s ruling directing the administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the White House account on X said in a post: “he’s NOT coming back.”

Legal experts said the Abrego Garcia case may be heading toward contempt.

U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis has complained of “bad faith” from the administration as she orders reports on what, if anything, it’s doing to comply with her order. But contempt processes are slow and deliberative, and, when the government’s involved, there’s usually a resolution before penalties kick in.

What is contempt of court?

Courts can hold parties to civil litigation or criminal cases in contempt for disobeying their orders. The penalty can take the form of fines or other civil punishments, or even prosecution and jail time, if pursued criminally.

The provision in the Republican budget bill would prohibit courts from enforcing contempt citations for violations of injunctions or temporary restraining orders — the two main types of rulings used to rein in the Trump administration — unless the plaintiffs have paid a bond. That rarely happens when someone sues the government.

In an extensive review of contempt cases involving the government, Yale law professor Nick Parrillo identified only 67 where someone was ultimately found in contempt. That was out of more than 650 cases where contempt was considered against the government. Appellate courts reliably overturned the penalties.

But the higher courts always left open the possibility that the next contempt penalties could stick.

“The courts, for their part, don’t want to find out how far their authority goes,” said David Noll, a Rutgers law professor, “and the executive doesn’t really want to undermine the legal order because the economy and their ability to just get stuff done depends on the law.”

‘It’s truly uncharted territory’

Legal experts are gaming out whether judges could appoint independent prosecutors or be forced to rely on Trump’s Department of Justice. Then there’s the question of whether U.S. marshals would arrest anyone convicted of the offense.

“If you get to the point of asking the marshals to arrest a contemnor, it’s truly uncharted territory,” Noll said.

There’s a second form of contempt that could not be blocked by the Department of Justice –- civil contempt, leading to fines. This may be a more potent tool for judges because it doesn’t rely on federal prosecution and cannot be expunged with a presidential pardon, said Justin Levitt, a department official in the Obama administration who also advised Democratic President Joe Biden.

“Should the courts want, they have the tools to make individuals who plan on defying the courts miserable,” Levitt said, noting that lawyers representing the administration and those taking specific actions to violate orders would be the most at risk.

There are other deterrents courts have outside of contempt.

Judges can stop treating the Justice Department like a trustworthy agency, making it harder for the government to win cases. There were indications in Friday’s Supreme Court order that the majority didn’t trust the administration’s handling of the deportations. And defying courts is deeply unpopular: A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 8 in 10 Americans say that if a federal court rules a Trump administration action is illegal, the government has to follow the court’s decision and stop its action.

That’s part of the reason the broader picture might not be as dramatic as the fights over a few of the immigration cases, said Vladeck, the Georgetown professor.

“In the majority of these cases, the courts are successfully restraining the executive branch and the executive branch is abiding by their rulings,” he said.

By TODD RICHMOND

Capt. Ed Enos makes his living as a harbor pilot in Hawaii, clambering aboard arriving ships in the predawn hours and guiding them into port.

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His world revolves around wind speeds, current strength and wave swells. When Enos is bobbing in dangerous waters in the dark, his cellphone is his lifeline: with a few taps he can access the Integrated Ocean Observing System and pull up the data needed to guide what are essentially floating warehouses safely to the dock.

But maybe not for much longer. President Donald Trump wants to eliminate all federal funding for the observing system’s regional operations. Scientists say the cuts could mean the end of efforts to gather real-time data crucial to navigating treacherous harbors, plotting tsunami escape routes and predicting hurricane intensity.

“It’s the last thing you should be shutting down,” Enos said. “There’s no money wasted. Right at a time when we should be getting more money to do more work to benefit the public, they want to turn things off. That’s the wrong strategy at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.”

Monitoring system tracks all things ocean

The IOOS system launched about 20 years ago. It’s made up of 11 regional associations in multiple states and territories, including the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington state, Michigan, South Carolina and Southern California.

The regional groups are networks of university researchers, conservation groups, businesses and anyone else gathering or using maritime data. The associations are the Swiss army knife of oceanography, using buoys, submersible drones and radar installations to track water temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, wave speeds, swell heights and current strength.

A map of sensor data as part of the Integrated Ocean Observing System is displayed Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

The networks monitor the Great Lakes, U.S. coastlines, the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Alaska, the Caribbean and the South Pacific and upload member data to public websites in real time.

Maritime community and military rely on system data

Cruise ship, freighter and tanker pilots like Enos, as well as the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, use the information directly to navigate harbors safely, plot courses around storms and conduct search-and-rescue operations.

The associations’ observations feed into National Weather Service forecasts. The Pacific Northwest association uses tsunami data to post real-time coastal escape routes on a public-facing app. And the Hawaii association not only posts data that is helpful to harbor pilots but tracks hurricane intensity and tiger sharks that have been tagged for research.

The associations also track toxic algal blooms, which can force beach closures and kill fish. The maps help commercial anglers avoid those empty regions. Water temperature data can help identify heat layers within the ocean and, because it’s harder for fish to survive in those layers, knowing hot zones helps anglers target better fishing grounds.

Weather data from the Integrated Ocean Observing System is displayed Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

The regional networks are not formal federal agencies but are almost entirely funded through federal grants through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The current federal budget allocates $43.5 million for the networks. A Republican bill in the House natural resources committee would actually send them more money, $56 million annually, from 2026 through 2030.

Cuts catch network administrators by surprise

A Trump administration memo leaked in April proposes a $2.5 billion cut to the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, in the 2026 federal budget.

Part of the proposal calls for eliminating federal funding for the regional monitoring networks, even though the memo says one of the activities the administration wants the commerce department to focus on is collecting ocean and weather data.

The memo offered no other justifications for the cuts. The proposal stunned network users.

“We’ve worked so hard to build an incredible system and it’s running smoothly, providing data that’s important to the economy. Why would you break it?” said Jack Barth, an Oregon State oceanographer who shares data with the Pacific Northwest association.

“What we’re providing is a window into the ocean and without those measures we frankly won’t know what’s coming at us. It’s like turning off the headlights,” Barth said.

NOAA officials declined to comment on the cuts and potential impacts, saying in an email to The Associated Press that they do not do “speculative interviews.”

Network’s future remains unclear

Nothing is certain. The 2026 federal fiscal year starts Oct. 1. The budget must pass the House, the Senate and get the president’s signature before it can take effect. Lawmakers could decide to fund the regional networks after all.

Network directors are trying not to panic. If the cuts go through, some associations might survive by selling their data or soliciting grants from sources outside the federal government. But the funding hole would be so significant that just keeping the lights on would be an uphill battle, they said.

If the associations fold, other entities might be able to continue gathering data, but there will be gaps. Partnerships developed over years would evaporate and data won’t be available in a single place like now, they said.

“People have come to us because we’ve been steady,” Hawaii regional network director Melissa Iwamoto said. “We’re a known entity, a trusted entity. No one saw this coming, the potential for us not to be here.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.