I read this article does a really bad summarization to me as someone who has not been tracking these satellites. I had to go look at the wiki for the OCO's. Turns out that OCO-2 & OCO-3 are in orbit and operating.

So as I understand this, Trump is not killing the launch of new Sat, but cutting off data collection on existing Sat launches. Further the reason these two SATs are so important is that although there are other Carbon Observers, they don't have the resolution these two do.

Overall, it's an entire waste of money to have built and spent something over a billion dollars, just to cut off the data that Oil companies don't want. (Or at least that's the perception.)

The article could have done a better job bottom lining this.