The Volcano Warning Network Congress Ordered in 2019 Is Still About 30% Built

The United States has about 170 potentially active volcanoes.▸ In 2018 the U.S. Geological Survey ranked 161 of them by threat — hazard multiplied by the people and infrastructure in range — and placed 18 in the top tier, "very high threat," concentrated in Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, and Hawaiʻi, according to USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2018-5140. A year later, Congress wrote a warning system for that list into law. The system it funded is still, by the agency's own count, roughly a third finished.

The 2018 assessment wasn't the first: a 2005 version had already flagged 57 volcanoes as monitored below the level their hazard warranted.▸ The update refined the scoring but didn't close the gap. By April 2019, Eos — the American Geophysical Union's news outlet, reporting on the same assessment — found that of the 18 volcanoes rated "very high threat," only three had monitoring networks the USGS considered adequate: Kīlauea, Mount St. Helens, and Long Valley Caldera. The rest, the outlet reported, fell short of the target.

Later that year, Charles Mandeville, the USGS Volcano Hazards Program's coordinator, told the House Natural Resources Committee that "the USGS is about 30 percent of the way to completing its NVEWS goal of monitoring all hazardous volcanoes commensurate with the threats that they pose," and that "several very-high-threat volcanoes, mainly in the Cascades (Oregon, Washington, and California), have only rudimentary monitoring networks at this time."▸ That testimony is the most recent public, on-the-record completion estimate for the network as a whole.

The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed in March 2019, formally authorized the National Volcano Early Warning System (NVEWS) and set a ceiling: $55 million in appropriations for fiscal years 2019 through 2023.▸ Congress never appropriated that sum in one stroke. It came in pieces — $30 million to the whole Volcano Hazards Program in FY2021, and by June 2022 the USGS had spent roughly $13.5 million of it on foundational NVEWS work, according to the Congressional Research Service. By FY2023, USGS budget records show NVEWS itself at $18.35 million within a $37.5 million Volcano Hazards Program total, on top of a separate, one-time $29 million appropriation to rebuild the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory after the 2018 Kīlauea eruption damaged its original facility.

Then the direction reversed.▸ The administration's FY2024 budget request proposed cutting the Volcano Hazards Program to $35.8 million — a $1.665 million net reduction — but the way the cut was distributed is the sharper fact: the entire $3.091 million reduction, and all four eliminated staff positions, came out of NVEWS alone, per the FY2024 USGS budget justification. That document names the consequence in its own words: at the requested funding level, "implementation would halt on 12 very high-threat volcanoes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, and 10 high-threat volcanoes in Alaska, California, Washington, Hawaii, and Wyoming."

The cut did not survive.▸ USGS's own FY2025 budget justification shows FY2024 funded under a continuing resolution at FY2023's $37.5 million level — not the reduced figure requested — and the agency then asked Congress for $39.68 million for FY2025, treating the higher, pre-cut baseline as the floor to build from rather than the number to defend.

The original $55 million NVEWS authorization expired at the end of FY2023 and has not been renewed.▸ Two bills introduced in 2025 would restart it — S. 1052 would authorize $75 million through FY2033, and H.R. 3176 would authorize $55 million for FY2026 through FY2030 — but as of this writing neither has been enacted. The network Congress ordered in 2019 is currently running on annual appropriations alone, with no statutory funding ceiling behind it.

The case for finishing the network is written into aviation records.▸ On December 15, 1989, KLM Flight 867 flew into the ash cloud from Alaska's Redoubt volcano and lost power in all four engines; the aircraft required $80 million in repairs, including replacement of every engine, per a USGS fact sheet on volcanic ash hazards to aviation. That fact sheet counts at least 15 aircraft damaged by ash along North Pacific air routes — among the busiest in the world — since 1980, and 80 such encounters worldwide in the same period, "causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and lost revenue."

Alaska carries the largest share of that risk and the largest share of the monitoring gap.▸ The state has about 140 active volcanoes, of which USGS considers 86 threatening to people or property; a Congressional Research Service tally names 18 of Alaska's high-to-very-high-threat volcanoes — including Mount Spurr, Augustine, Iliamna, and Mount Churchill — as still under-monitored. The Alaska Volcano Observatory has made recent progress against that list: it finished converting the state's monitoring stations from analog to digital telemetry, and has replaced at least 53 outdated instruments and installed at least 55 new ones on the state's very-high- and high-threat volcanoes, per the same CRS report.

Funding figures are FY2022-FY2025 as published in USGS/DOI budget justifications; monitoring and completion figures reflect 2018-2019 assessments and testimony, the most recent USGS has stated publicly in those specific terms.