In May, the National Science Foundation announced that it would scale down the Ocean Observatories Initiative, but has since canceled these plans. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski created a bipartisan bill, which passed unanimously in the United States Senate, to restore and resume the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The OOI data center is housed in Burt Hall and stores all the data from the entire project, not just the data collected by OSU. By the time the array is back to its full operation, there will be about a year and a half of reduced data collected. Most of the data collected by the OOI supports research, with some helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration make weather forecasts.