CONGRESS TO MAINTAIN NMFS FUNDING

 

2025 was a bad year for the National Marine Fisheries Service, as the incoming administration made sharp personnel cuts, which reduced staff throughout the agency, including at the regional fisheries science centers.  As a result, stock assessments of important species were cancelled or delayed, fisheries data could not be gathered and analyzed, and NMFS was rendered less able to protect the nation’s living marine resources while also serving the needs of the nation’s fishermen.

For a while, it looked like 2026 was going to be worse.

Last September, the House of Representatives released a budget that would have cut NMFS funding by about 40%, an action that the Ocean Conservancy, a conservation group that focuses on marine issues, said, “would spell disaster for fisheries.”  The House proposal would have cut funding for fisheries science by 42%, cut the budget for fisheries management by 44%, reduced funding for habitat protection and restoration by 38%, and slashed the allocation for “protected species,” that is, marine mammals and endangered species, by 55%.

The Trump administration proposed a smaller, 30%, cut to NMFS budget, but also contemplated moving the agency out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—which the administration was effectively gutting because of the President’s dislike of climate science—and merging it into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Either way, the outlook for the agency appeared to be bleak.

Fortunately, the Senate took a more rational approach to the funding issue, and over the course of the budget negotiations, convinced the House to do the same.  As a result, 2026 NMFS funding will be roughly the same as it was in 2025, and about $300 million in cuts originally proposed by the House will not occur.   The total amount provided for NMFS Operations, Research, and Facilities will be $1,121,703,000.

According to the website civileats.com, which reports on food-related issues and frequently covers topics affecting the commercial fishing industry,

“On the Senate floor, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the bill reflected months of work involving significant bipartisan compromise.  It will also support the lobster and fishing industries of particular concern in Maine, she said.  ‘The Commerce bill also supports our oceans and fisheries and weather programs that are enormously important to our working waterfronts.’”

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that the compromise bill, which provides funding not just for NMFS, but for “Commerce, Justice, Science, & Related Agencies,” also provides

“Funding for NOAA [that] includes $32 million for the National Ocean and Coastal Security Fund and $81.5 million for Coastal Zone Management Grants, which improve the resilience of coastal communities around the country.  It also includes $7.1 million for the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, including $3.25 million for oyster restoration activities—an increase of $1.5 million—and $80 million for the National Sea Grant College program and $14 million for Sea Grant Aquaculture program, all of which support improved health and productivity of the Chesapeake Bay.  The bill also includes $2.5 million for a new menhaden survey in the Chesapeake Bay to ensure the sustainability of a critical species.”

While it’s only natural for a Maryland senator to emphasize the benefits the bill brings to his home waters, the programs mentioned in Sen. Van Hollen’s press release will have impacts that reach far beyond the Chesapeake Bay.  NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office, for example, engages with scientists to conduct ongoing striped bass research within the Bay, which is, by far, the species’ most important spawning ground.  And, hopefully, funding a new menhaden study for the Chesapeake Bay will finally end the decades-long debate as to whether “localized depletion” of menhaden is taking place in the Bay and, if it is, open the door to efforts to correct the situation, something that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board is already exploring.

The House has already passed the bill that includes the NMFS funding.  The Senate might pass it as soon as tomorrow.

But, then again, it might not.

Last month, the Trump administration took action to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is located in Colorado.  Along with its work related to better predicting the weather, the Center housed the largest federal climate change research program, which apparently made it a target of the science-averse administration, which seems to believe that it can ignore climate trends simply by pretending that they don’t exist.  Thus, while calling the Center

“one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,”

and citing

“two instances of the lab’s ‘woke direction’ that wastes taxpayer funds on what [an] official called frivolous pursuits and ideologies,”

including an experiment that

“traced air pollution to [according to an administration official] ‘demonize motor vehicles, oil and gas operations,’”

the administration set about dismantling it.

That action didn’t sit right with at least one Colorado senator, so it is possible that the funding bill might be delayed while the question of whether the Center should be closed or maintained can be straightened out.

Hopefully, that will happen soon.  For while the pending bill still doesn’t give NMFS all of the funding it needs to perform stock assessments and collect needed data on the 400-plus species that it manages, it nonetheless maintains funding at a level that will not cripple the agency and will allow it to go about its work of conserving and managing the nation’s fish stocks.

Given our current political environment, that is enough to be deemed good news.