Google or Amazon should offer to sponsor it and make the data accessible in their respective cloud computing platforms. There's tons of potential for data analysis / consultancy companies to work on this data and it's too big to process anywhere else.

The major cost of the data is gathering it not distributing it. But I agree this is something that needs to be archived.

I have a feeling this might be a bluff. This scare might just be politics as usual. It just doesn't make sense to cut this, especially if they're saving money.

Worth noting that nothing has been cut yet