CONSIDERING THE FUTURE OF FEDERAL FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

 

On February 28, the National Marine Fisheries Service closed two bluefin tuna fisheries, the Angling Category Southern Area Trophy Fishery, which targets bluefin larger than 73 inches curved fork length in the waters between central New Jersey and the southeast coast of Florida, and the General Category commercial fishery which targets the same sized fish.  The latter fishery will reopen on June 1.

The reason for the closure is the high volume of large medium and giant bluefin tuna landings occurring this winter off the coast of North Carolina.

Normally, except for the unusually high volume of landings that led to such action, the closure would have been deemed unremarkable.  NMFS routinely closes bluefin tuna fisheries when regional and/or category closures are exceeded.  But this year’s bluefin closure was being watched very carefully, because it was an early test of how NMFS might react in a new presidential administration that is notably hostile to regulatory agencies, and makes no secret of its intent to limit regulatory actions.  

Over the past week, I was in contact with a number of people from both the recreational fishing industry and the conservation community, who were reaching out, asking for my views on the bluefin tuna situation that was unfolding in North Carolina, and whether I thought that NMFS would be able to close the relevant fisheries or whether, as a result of administration policy, would allow the overfishing to continue.

The good news is that NMFS did its job and acted to conserve the bluefin resource, which provides some hope that it will be able to continue to manage other fish stocks in the future.  But how well it will be able to manage U.S. fisheries remains unknown.  Some bad signs have already emerged.

Probably the most worrisome are the cuts already made to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff (NOAA is NMFS' parent agency) and the additional cuts that are likely to come.  NOAA has already laid off 880 people, about five percent of its staff, and while most of the news of the layoffs has focused on jobs related to weather forecasting and climate change, many fisheries scientists were also affected.  Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) opined that such cuts

“jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—putting communities in harm’s way.  They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries, including thousands in the State of Washington.  This action is a direct threat to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”

According to a recent article in Newsweek, the nation’s commercial and recreational fisheries generate $300 billion each year in sales and value-added activity.  Janet Coit, who headed NMFS during the Biden administration, told Newsweek that she believed

“if the NOAA personnel were cut, you would see a cascading set of negative impacts.  While fishermen complain about regulation, as do many businesses, they also know that the regulation is what maintains the resource in the long term.”

Aside from personnel cuts, the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee has approved a 2025 funding bill that reduces NMFS Science and Management budget from $710 million to $637 million, while also reducing the agency’s Enforcement budget from $82 million to $68 million. 

While there’s little doubt that some fishermen would celebrate the opportunities for short-term profits that would accrue if NMFS regulators and enforcement agents were less able to do their jobs, there is also little doubt that, without the basic scientific work that NMFS does every day—the fisheries-independent and fisheries-dependent surveys, the updated stock assessments, the expanding knowledge of basic fish biology and how fish respond to oceanographic conditions, including a warming ocean—the long-term outlook for healthy and profitable fisheries would be poor.

For just one example of the problems cuts in NMFS’ funding and staffing could cause, consider Framework 17 to the Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Fishery Management Plan, also known as the Recreational Harvest Control Rule Framework.  Framework 17 sets out the procedure used to determine the annual recreational landings target for the three named species, which employs a matrix that requires managers to know how the current spawning stock biomass of each species relates to that species spawning stock biomass target, and also requires managers to determine whether recreational landings for the upcoming year are likely to equal, exceed, or fall short of the recreational harvest limit, which limit also considers, among other things, the spawning stock biomass of the relevant stock.

Framework 17 is based on the assumption that the stock assessment for each managed species will be updated every two years.  Such stock assessment provides managers with an estimate of the maximum sustainable yield that can be produced by each managed stock, the spawning stock biomass needed to achieve maximum sustainable yield (the “biomass target”), and how current spawning stock biomass compares to the biomass target.  In order to perform the calculations required by Framework 17, managers also need to know what recreational fishermen’s landings were in previous years, in order to predict what they are likely to be in the future if management measures remain unchanged; the relationship between past and projected future landings determines whether any regulatory changes are needed to either further conserve the stock or to provide more harvest opportunities to recreational fishermen.

Performing the stock assessments, and collecting and collating the recreational landings data, is a labor-intensive effort, yet it is necessary for Framework 17 to work.  If any of the necessary data are unavailable, recreational landings targets for future years cannot be set.  We already saw this happen in 2023, when demands on NMFS’ scientific staff led to a delay in the completion of a research-track black sea bass stock assessment, and resulted in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council being unable to calculate recreational black sea bass management measures for the 2024 season.

Reductions in NMFS’ scientific staff will virtually assure that managers will lack needed data in the future, and that whatever data is provided will often arrive well behind schedule.

Of course, there will be those, particularly in the recreational fishing community, who are probably looking forward to the federal fisheries management program being crippled.  A group of recreational fishing industry organizations, gathered under the umbrella of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, has long been trying to move the management of certain species, most particularly red snapper, away from federal managers obliged to adhere to the requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and into the control of state fishery managers, who are not governed by Magnuson-Stevens, and are often more vulnerable to political pressure exerted by special interest groups than is NMFS.

The current efforts to depopulate and defund NMFS plays into the hands of such organizations.  It is easy to imagine them proposing—because they’ve already tried—that that NMFS surrender its role in gathering recreational catch, landings, and effort data, in favor of state data programs that may not be as statistically rigorous as NMFS’ Marine Recreational Information Program, chronically undercount anglers’ landings, and so allow larger harvests to occur.  It’s equally easy to imagine—because they’ve already tried this, too—that such organizations will attempt to convince NMFS to hand management authority of recreationally important species over to state agencies unburdened by Magnuson-Stevens, which may allow overfishing to occur, and need not rebuild overfished stocks if there is political incentive to refrain from acting.

And given that angling industry groups such as the Center for Sportfishing Policy, American Sportfishing Association, and Coastal Conservation Association are already fawning over the newly appointed Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, it is easy to imagine that such conversations may have already begun,.

Still, if the current administration cripples NMFS ability to properly manage fish stocks, it’s not unreasonable to look to the states, and to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, to provide a backstop, at least with respect to those species that support state-waters fisheries.

But even there, reductions in funding and agency actions can do real harm. 

The ASMFC, for example, receives funding from multiple sources, including payments made directly by the member states.  However, a substantial majority of its funding comes from either NMFS grants or from Congress, and can be badly hurt, and unable to fill in for lost federal management assets, if its federal funds are cut back.

Coastal states also run Sea Grant programs through various state universities, which conduct fisheries research and act as resources for the recreational and commercial fishing industries.  Those programs are heavily reliant on federal grants.  And just last Friday, one of those state programs, Maine Sea Grant, received a letter from NOAA that

“It has been determined that the program activities proposed to be carried out in Year 2 of the Maine Sea Grant Omnibus Award are no longer relevant to the focus of the Administration’s priorities and program objectives.”

As a result, Maine Sea Grant will lose about $1.5 million in financing this year, and about $4.5 million that it had expected to receive through January 2028.

Including Maine, 34 states maintain Sea Grant programs, and so far, as far as we know, none of the others have received similar notices.  So, it isn’t yet clear whether the letter received by Maine was merely the first shot in a campaign to defund Sea Grant—in which case an important source of research and fishing industry support will be lost—or whether Maine's defunding was merely done in a fit of pique after Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, refused to kiss the president’s ring at a meeting of governors that took place at the White House a week before.

But right now, the Sea Grant programs have to be considered at risk.

And things aren’t much better at the international level.

There are rumors going around that the administration is considering pulling the U.S. out of ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas.  While that rumor has not been confirmed, should it prove to be true, it would remove the United States, historically one of the most prominent supporters of highly migratory species conservation, from the international arena, and probably encourage some of the remaining ICCAT members to oppose needed management measures.

Regardless of whether the United States remains an ICCAT member, right now, there is a gag order in effect that prohibits NMFS staff from communicating with their counterparts in other nations, a situation which is hampering international management and law enforcement efforts.

The National Fisherman, a publication serving the commercial fishing community, noted that

“NOAA plays a key role in enforcing global treaties, tackling illegal fishing, and managing migratory species like tuna and swordfish.  Limiting international cooperation could weaken enforcement efforts and disrupt global suppy chains.”

Thus, the future of federal fisheries management is not at all clear.  The current administration seems to be more than willing to undercut fisheries science and law enforcement, while Congress—or, at least, the House of Representatives—appears unwilling to appropriate the funds needed for NMFS to perform its myriad enforcement, conservation, and management functions.  The efforts to hamper NMFS’ operations aren’t limited to the agency itself, but threaten its state, regional, and international partners’ efforts as well.

It is not at all certain that either NOAA or NMFS will survive the next four years and, even if they survive, whether they will bear any resemblance to what those agencies have been in the past, or whether they will merely be gutted shells unable to carry out their intended missions.  And should the latter be the case, there is no knowing when, or if, they will ever be restored to their former capabilities.

It is very possible that, when 2029 dawns, fisheries will find themselves where they were thirty years and more ago, before the Sustainable Fisheries Act was passed, when New Englandtrawlers stayed tied to their docks because there were too few groundfish to make fishing worthwhile, and summer flounder had become so scarce that not onlyanglers, but even NMFS’ survey vessels, had difficulty finding adults more thanthree years old.

Should that be the case, and three decades of progress is lost, we will learn in four years whether Congress might still care enough to begin the long process of rebuilding our fisheries all over again, or whether it will move on, leaving the nation’s marine resources just another casualty of an ill-conceived policy and an administration more interested in tearing down what others have built than in creating anything new that might achieve lasting worth.