Sustainability advocates worry that deregulation, combined with cuts to monitoring agencies, will mean a return to the depletion of US fish stocks.
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Sustainability advocates worry that deregulation, combined with cuts to monitoring agencies, will mean a return to the depletion of US fish stocks.
April 18, 2025
April 18, 2025 – President Donald Trump yesterday announced an effort to create a “new era” of seafood policy, with an executive order that aims to “reduce the regulatory burden” on U.S. fisheries. Ocean sustainability groups have expressed concerns that the order could damage ocean ecosystems and deplete fisheries.
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“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Trump wrote in the order, Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness. “But in addition to overregulation, unfair trade practices have put our seafood markets at a competitive disadvantage.”
The order tasks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to work with the Department of Health and Human Services and the fishing industry to “immediately consider suspending, revising, or rescinding regulations that overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries at the fishery-specific level.” It also orders an examination of trade policies to benefit U.S. fishing.
U.S. fisheries experienced severe overfishing in the 1980s and 1990s, with essential fish stocks either depleting or collapsing. In the decades since, the stocks have recovered, in large part due to stricter fishing regulations and close monitoring. The government agency tasked with monitoring fish stocks, through scientific survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, underwent major personnel cuts after Trump’s inauguration.
The Department of Commerce fired more than 600 probationary employees in February. And while lower court judges ordered many of them reinstated in March, the Supreme Court has since paused some of the reinstatements. Workers told NBC News this week the agency is suffering under “intentional chaos,” due to the cuts. Firings have since resumed, Reuters reported on April 10.
Advocacy groups say Trump’s newest order endangers U.S. fisheries anew, at a time when they are facing increasing pressure from climate change.
“Between firing experts at NOAA, delaying fishing seasons, and disrupting ocean science and data collection, the Trump administration is causing unprecedented chaos,” Meredith Moore, Ocean Conservancy’s senior director for fish conservation, said in a statement. “Today’s executive order would weaken, not strengthen, our fishing industry by increasing the risk that overfishing drives our fish stocks into decline, effectively taking healthy U.S. seafood off the menu. The U.S. fishing management system already maximizes catch to the limit that science says is sustainable.”
It was not the only fisheries-related move from the administration. An official proclamation from the president also announced a plan for “unleashing American commercial fishing” into the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. “This action threatens to reverse decades of progress that have reduced overfishing and exploitation of one of the planet’s last wild, healthy ocean ecosystems and a place of cultural significance for Pacific Islanders,” the Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition said in a statement.
The national monument, which was established in 2009 at the end of the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration, “includes some of America’s most pristine coral reefs and ocean ecosystems,” Douglas McCauley, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and director of Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, said in a statement. “It is a safe haven for endangered sea turtles, the feeding and breeding ground for millions of seabirds, and a place of refuge for endangered marine mammals. Only 3 percent of our worldwide ocean is strongly protected today and our monuments are a significant portion of this figure. In attempting to downgrade the protection of this unique monument, we are devaluing a critically important asset in America’s ocean wealth portfolio.” (Link to this post.)
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