While the rest of us are stressing about icy roads, moose traffic jams, and whether we’ll ever see real snow again, Sen. John Barrasso is busy tackling something far deeper, literally thousands of feet deeper, beneath the ocean.
This week, Barrasso teamed up with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to introduce the Strategic Subsea Cables Act of 2025, a bipartisan effort designed to protect the global network of fiber-optic cables that keep the internet alive. These undersea tubes are the reason you can stream football at the Spur, buy overpriced Jackson holiday gifts online, and share 47 photos of Monday’s alpenglow sunset.
And according to the senators, those cables are increasingly at risk thanks to sabotage, geopolitical tension, and the occasional “oops we dragged our anchor over it” incident.
What Barrasso’s Bill Actually Does
Despite sounding like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, the bill is pretty straightforward. It would:
- Make undersea cables official U.S. critical infrastructure
- Boost American participation in global cable-protection groups (yes, these exist)
- Require federal staff to actually track and coordinate cable issues
- Streamline emergency repairs so the internet doesn’t melt down
- Allow sanctions on countries or actors who intentionally damage subsea cables
- Create a federal coordinating committee so agencies and telecom companies stop acting like strangers at a middle-school dance
In short, Barrasso wants the U.S. to take these ocean-floor information highways seriously before someone with a submarine and bad intentions decides to yank the plug.
Why Should Jackson Hole Care?
Because, surprise, our little mountain town depends on those international cables way more than we depend on the WiFi at Pearl Street Bagels. Nearly all global internet traffic travels through them.
No cables = no streaming, no online shopping, no banking, no doomscrolling, no Teton Tattle newsletters, and absolutely no “look at this moose in my driveway” reels. Society would collapse in hours.
And while we might be 800 miles from the nearest ocean, we’re still plugged into what those cables carry.
Barrasso is diving into deep-sea geopolitics so the rest of us can keep complaining about road closures, reading prediction market gossip, and ordering ski gear at 2 a.m.
It’s bipartisan. It’s global. It’s weirdly important. And it’s one more reminder that the real threats to American stability aren’t just at the border or in D.C., sometimes they’re 12,000 feet underwater with a frayed wire.
AntlersArch founder and the voice behind Teton Tattle.
