Impact on fisheries especially harsh
By Meg Wilcox
At a seafood expo in Boston last month, Togue Brawn, the founder of the seafood business Downeast Dayboat, spoke up from the audience to ask a panel of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) administrators an urgent question about funding.
What, Brawn wanted to know, is the status of the Saltonstall
Kennedy program? The grant program—which helps fishing communities market
their catch, build capacity, and conduct research to advance their
fisheries—had been on hold for a year. “As someone who works with a lot of
small-boat fishermen, we could use all the help we can get,” she told the
panelists.
But Eugenio Pineiro Soler, assistant administrator of NOAA
Fisheries, could not say when the popular program would restart.
Congress fully
funded NOAA in January, ignoring the
president’s plan to gut the agency. But NOAA has yet to restart many
programs that were put on hold by the Trump administration in 2025, and the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is slow-walking the release of
congressionally approved funding.
“OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] controls the purse strings, and [Director] Russell Vought has essentially said, Congress may appropriate it, but that doesn’t mean we have to spend,” noted Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service.
NOAA hasn’t been dismantled, as experts feared, but its
ability to carry out its duties—monitoring and conserving fish stocks, managing
coastal waters, and predicting changes in weather, climate, and the oceans—is
diminished. Big staffing cuts, the uncertainty of when and if the OMB will
release program funds, and executive orders redirecting the agency’s priorities
all impact fishing communities.
And the existential threat to the agency remains: The
administration’s proposed budget for next year, released in April, once
again slashes
NOAA to the bone. Moreover, a new Ocean
Conservancy report finds that the agency cannot let down its guard: 42
of 500 managed stocks are overfished, while 65 percent are
being rebuilt or had flat or decreasing population estimates.
Here’s a closer look at the state of NOAA today.
Job Vacancies Largely Unfilled
NOAA Fisheries lost
nearly 550 of its 3,000 employees last year, many of whom were career
scientists working at the agency’s five regional science offices. One-quarter were
firings of probationary staff; the remainder were resignations.
“It’s very difficult to lose and replace that type of
expertise,” said Meredith Moore, director of the fish conservation program at
Ocean Conservancy. Some regions were harder hit, with the Pacific Northwest
region reporting a 40
percent loss of staff and Alaska losing
half its employees.
NOAA staffers declined interviews with Civil Eats for this
article. Outside observers say that last year’s job cuts and the
administration’s new “Schedule Policy/Care” rule stripping
federal employees of civil service protections has had a profound chilling
effect on their willingness to speak to the press.
“Everyone understands the precarity of the situation that
they’re in,” Moore said.
However, when asked how many positions might be rehired, a
NOAA spokesperson did respond by saying that it was longstanding practice not
to discuss personnel matters and adding, “we don’t speculate about things that
may or may not happen in the future.”
While it’s unclear how many fishery employees may be
rehired, none of the 21 NOAA jobs now listed are
for fishery scientists.
At least one regional science office, in Alaska, has been
cleared to hire back three out of 37 staff cut last year, said Linda Behnken, a
fisher and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.
The agency’s National
Ocean Service—which oversees coastal zone management, marine navigation,
and the popular Sea Grant program,
which funds collaborative research in every coastal and Great Lakes state—lost
20 percent of its staff and isn’t rehiring.
Derek Brockbank, executive director at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit
that coordinates the work of state coastal zone management offices, said the
agency is only hiring for administration priorities, like deep-sea mining and
aquaculture.
The National Weather Service (NWS), however, has been hiring
to replace the 550 staff who were fired or resigned last year. It’s “really
focused on hiring recent graduates, which is cool,” said Tom DiLiberto, a
meteorologist and former NOAA spokesperson now at Climate Central, a nonprofit
climate research organization. But, he adds, “You can’t replace 30 years
of experience with someone just out of school.”
Delayed Stock Assessments and Guidance
Deep staff cuts are hobbling fisheries management. The stock
assessments that underpin regulatory decisions are being delayed, made less
rigorous, or dropped altogether. NOAA is also behind schedule with issuing some
of the rules that guide fishing.
In the Gulf region, for instance, “Fishery management plans
are backing up and bottlenecking,” said Eric Brazer, deputy director of the
Gulf of America Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance. “We have about 10 actions
the Gulf Council has taken
that are waiting for NOAA rulemaking. They’re lost in the process, because NOAA
doesn’t have the resources to move these things through.”
Similarly, in Alaska, fishers have learned that a
long-expected rule amendment was pushed to 2028, said Linda Behnken, a
fisherman and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s
Association. The amendment would allow fishermen to release at sea
unintentionally harvested, undersized sablefish rather than having to land them
and count them toward their quota.
Having to land those small fish, which fetch $2 a pound
versus $6 or $7 a pound for larger fish, has “a huge impact on the industry,”
Behnken said. “It can make your catch worth half to a third less.”
NOAA’s Alaska science office also rolled over last year’s
quota and fishing limits without doing stock assessments, Behnken said. “That’s
super risky because in some cases the surveys show a big decline.”
Meanwhile, the northeast science office dropped the
number of stock assessments planned for 2026 from 20 to six. Another six stock
assessments were downgraded to updates.
Many, however, support such scaled-back stock assessments.
“For the most part, [these] are going to be fine and we probably need to do
that anyway,” said Charlie Phillips, owner of Phillips Seafood and Sapelo Sea
Farm and a member of South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
Fisheries Management Pushed to the States
A NOAA spokesperson said the fisheries division was working
with independent regional councils to implement last April’s executive order
titled Restoring
American Seafood Competitiveness, including “considering where regulatory
changes are needed to simplify or improve fisheries management.”
One way the councils are following the president’s executive
order is by shifting management to the states. The Pacific Northwest Council,
for instance, removed
47 species from federal management. California agreed to manage six
groundfish (blue rockfish, deacon rockfish, cabezon, China rockfish, copper
rockfish, and kelp greenling).
Oregon and Washington declined to do so, compromising with
NOAA to move the same six species into an “ecosystem component” system, which
means they’re still monitored but not subject to federal regulations, fishing
permits, or annual catch limits.
That creates a messy, confusing system and it weakens the
fisheries, Moore said, noting that the West Coast groundfish fishery has been a
big management success. “It’s wild that we’re just throwing a bunch of species
out of management.”
Most states don’t have the resources, enforcement capacity,
or scientific capability to manage the species the federal government drops.
“They don’t have legal requirements to understand what overfishing is or to
rebuild the stock if it’s depleted,” Moore said.
Neither are they authorized to manage fish in federal
waters, which are three miles offshore. Also, states will ask for payment to
pick up the management, Rosenberg said, so no money is actually saved.
“It’s a dance to figure out what level of protection [a
species] needs and at the amount of resources you have,” Phillips said. “We
didn’t have the funds before they started cutting things, and we definitely
don’t have funds now.”
Deregulation of Entire Fisheries
The Magnuson
Stevens Act, which governs fisheries in federal waters, includes a
provision for experimental permitting, which allows NOAA to issue permits for
catch quotas beyond set limits. Historically, the agency has granted
experimental permits to support cooperative research, such as for testing new
types of fishing gear.
Now it’s applying this permitting provision, relabeling it
as “exempted,” to an entire fishing sector, approving red snapper for exempted
permits for recreational fishing in Florida, Georgia, and South and North
Carolina.
“It was one of the solutions in the President’s seafood
competitiveness executive order to allow for additional fishing opportunity,”
Moore said, describing it as “a giant loophole to get around all of the
protections.”
Last week, NOAA approved red snapper for exempted permits
for recreational fishing in Florida, Georgia, and South and North Carolina.
Moore said such a move spells disaster. “Our estimate of the total amount of
fishing that the recreational sector will do under these exempted permits is 20
times the sustainable annual catch limit, which is going to cause a lot of
overfishing and very plausibly crash the stock.”
“I am very, very skeptical that this is going to come out
well,” Phillips said.
Climate Research Division Intact, but Hobbled
Congress did not jettison NOAA’s climate science research
division, the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), but the
16 cooperative institutes that
collaborate with OAR to research climate-change impacts on our oceans and
weather were “hit very hard,” Rosenberg said. These university-based institutes
collect, analyze, and model long-term temperatures and atmospheric chemistry,
among other tasks.
“They’ve fired all the staff, and they’re refusing to rehire
them,” he said, adding that the administration is also starving the programs of
funding. The cooperative institute at Princeton, for example, lost
all its funding last year. The Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado, will furlough
half its staff in May if NOAA doesn’t resume funding for its grants.
To add to the challenges, in some instances, the OMB doles
out money in 30-day spend plans, making it incredibly difficult for scientists
to conduct research or for OAR to carry out a long-term mission, Moore said.
Furthermore, eroding OAR’s ability to do core science
research ultimately hurts the weather service that fishers rely on for their
safety. The NWS depends on that data and modeling to forecast the weather.
It also hurts our understanding of fishery populations.
“With the way the oceans are changing so quickly, we’ve had 98 percent drops in
fish populations over two years,” Behnken said, adding, “Those are the impacts
we’re going to face” with a handicapped NOAA—one with fewer staff and no
ability, she said, “to do the climate modeling and predicting we’ve always
relied on.”
National Weather Service Remains Public, but Trust Is
Eroded
Many worried the administration would privatize weather
services, but that’s not happening “to the levels people were fearing,” said
DiLiberto.
NOAA is shifting to buying satellite and weather-balloon information
from private companies to fill gaps in its own underfunded data collection, but
when it comes to weather forecasting, it’s not yet privatizing those services.
“[The administration] is not going to be allowed to
privatize weather,” Rosenberg said, “but they’re going to make it impossible
[for NOAA] to collect all the weather data and make it harder to produce the
[weather forecast] products.”
DiLiberto worries more that “no one trusts anything going on
with the weather service any more” because the staff cuts have sometimes led to
faulty forecasts with tragic
consequences. That’s a big concern, he said, because a forecast is only as
good as people getting it, understanding it, and acting on it.
Looking Toward the Future
NOAA has significant bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, so
experts aren’t worried about the president’s proposed cuts in funding for the
coming year.
They worry more about the OMB’s ability to starve the agency
of current and future funding, and the administration’s attacks on science and
research institutions. Though OMB’s tactics may be questionable from
a legal standpoint, withholding funding is one of the many ways the Trump
Administration is breaking norms to achieve its agenda.
“They’ve realized that you can withhold the money and make
it difficult,” Rosenberg said. “They might not cut the programs but take a
really long time to move the money—and kill the work that way.”
Meg Wilcox is an award-winning journalist based in Boston
covering food systems, sustainable fisheries, environmental health, and climate
change. Her articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Scientific
American, Smithsonian Magazine, Salon, Environmental Health
News, Eater, and other publications. See her portfolio at
megwilcoxcommunications.com, and follow her at @megwilcox.bsky.social
