Plundering the Abyss: How Trump Gutted NOAA to Pave the Way for Deep-Sea Mining

The Pacific guardians were silenced. Now the deep sea is open for business.

In the dark waters of the Pacific, a new kind of gold rush is underway. But this time, the gold is cobalt, nickel, and manganese, and the rush is being led not by private industry alone, but by a U.S. government agency once devoted to protecting the very ocean it's now being weaponized to exploit.

In April 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources," directing what remains of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to expedite deep-sea mining permits. Behind that dry bureaucratic language is a devastating reality: the dismantling of NOAA's conservation mission in favor of an extractive agenda that ignores science, international law, and ecological sanity.

The order bypasses the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority (ISA), a body tasked with regulating ocean floor mining in international waters. The U.S. has never ratified the UNCLOS treaty that empowers the ISA, and Trump’s executive order effectively gives U.S.-affiliated companies the green light to mine without waiting for global consensus. It’s a unilateral play that undermines decades of legal precedent and global ocean governance.

The most immediate target? The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a stretch of the Pacific Ocean seabed roughly the size of the continental United States. It's rich in polymetallic nodules and even richer in biodiversity, much of it still unexplored. Companies like The Metals Company, a Canadian firm with close ties to this administration’s energy advisors, have already filed permit applications. NOAA, under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is expected to rubber-stamp them.

This is no longer the NOAA we once knew. According to internal sources, the Marine Habitat Conservation division, particularly in the Pacific, has been gutted. Senior staff were dismissed or forced out, and the entire Pacific branch dismantled. While not every program was zeroed out, the agency’s ability to provide ecological oversight has been neutered. What's left is a husk, one now forced to facilitate what it once sought to prevent.

Environmental groups and Pacific Island leaders are sounding the alarm. For communities already facing the frontlines of climate change, deep-sea mining represents an existential threat. As Michael Lujan Bevacqua wrote, "For those of us in the Pacific, most affected by climate change, the gutting of NOAA is really scary."

More than 30 nations have called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, joined by scientists, legal experts, and even some tech companies wary of associating their green reputations with deep ocean destruction. But the Trump administration has chosen to isolate the U.S., betting that critical minerals justify ecological devastation and geopolitical recklessness.

This is a systematic transformation of government agencies from stewards of the public good into blunt instruments of private and political power. It’s about the silencing of scientific voices, the purging of watchdogs, and the reconfiguration of NOAA into a compliant cog in a corporate extraction machine.

And it's about all of us who are watching, speaking out and fighting back. When the abyss is plundered, it doesn’t just swallow nodules and sediment, it swallows truth, trust, and the fragile hope of sustainability.