HOUSE FUNDING CUTS THREATEN UNITED STATES' FISHERIES

 

It has become a recurrent theme.

Every year, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s budget for the next fiscal year is considered, and every year, there are those who seek to slash it to the bone and beyond, supporting cuts so deep that they threaten the agency’s ability to function.  This year’s struggles over the NMFS budget are likely to be some of the worst that we’ve ever seen.

The Senate, in an effort to comply with the terms of this year’s debt ceiling bill, is likely to seek a $42 million reduction in the NMFS budget.  That cut has drawn its share of criticism; Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), observed that

“I have very real concerns about the impacts these cuts will have on Alaska’s fisheries.

“We have the well-deserved reputation across the world as the gold standard of fisheries, and keeping that reputation requires strategic investments in things like stock-assessment surveys, data collection and other resources essential to sustainable resource management.  I’m committed to making sure Alaska’s fisheries have the resources to remain a world-leader.”

While Sen. Murkowski is naturally concerned, first and foremost, with the fisheries of her home state, her concerns are just as applicable to all of the nation’s marine fisheries. 

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Management Act is probably the most comprehensive and most successful fisheries law in the world, but is has created a science-based management system, and good science doesn’t come cheap.  Using science to develop management measures that continually adapt to the changing health of every fish stock is a very resource-intensive process.  It certainly requires far more financial support, while producing far better results, than a system based on anecdotal reports and purely economic concerns.  Unfortunately, there are too many people, in both the recreational and the commercial fisheries, that would love to see such a haphazard approach take root.

If the House of Representatives gets their way, such people might just get their wish, as the House has recently proposed a 14% cut—about $900 million—to the NMFS budget.

Even at today's funding levels, NMFS lacks the resources to regularly assess all of the recreationally and commercially important fish stocks, including currently unmanaged forage species, assemble the data necessary to protect marine ecosystems from accelerating commercial activities off the nation’s coasts, and fully evaluate the impacts of a warming ocean on marine fisheries.  A 14% reduction in NMFS’ budget would clearly hamstring the agency.

And that’s probably exactly what the House majority would like to do.  While every House budget is slanted toward the ideology of the majority party, the rhetoric surrounding the 2024 budget is an extreme example, with the Appropriations Committee, sounding almost like a caricature of political communication, saying that

“The bill reins in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs…”

without ever explaining why such agencies and programs aren’t the right size right now.  

Not surprisingly, there were also the obligatory references to “eliminating the regulatory state” and “reducing government restrictions on businesses, in order to boost private sector growth and innovation,” language that keeps their corporate donors happy and so also keeps the contributions flowing in.

The concept of conserving natural resources for the use and enjoyment of future generations never appears in the budget-related documents, something which is also no cause for surprise, nor is it surprising that the majority of House members have little interest in adequately funding an agency such as NMFS, which regulates business in order to achieve such conservation goals.

But the House may have reached a new low with language that it included in the appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice departments, where it included a policy statement declaring that

“None of the funds made available by this Act shall be used…by the Department of Commerce for…climate change fisheries research…  [formatting omitted],”

since climate change, and the impacts that it is having on coastal fish stocks, may be the single greatest challenge facing today’s fisheries managers. 

In the Pacific, it’s causing real harm to salmon, both by decreasing the amount of food available to the fish when they’re in the ocean and by creating physical changes in the water itself, which make it more difficult for salmon to feed, escape predators, and even find their way back to their natal rivers.  Warming waters are also forcing Pacific cod farther north, into waters where they may not be able to spawn successfully.  A rapidly warming ocean is also the most likely cause of the collapse of the Alaskan snow crab fishery, which has caused a substantial disruption to the state’s commercial fishery.

In both the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic, scientists are blaming warming waters for the sharp decline in southern flounder abundance, a decline which has harmed both commercial and recreational fishermen.  Researchers in North Carolina have suggested that a shorter exposure to cool water has caused an imbalance in the southern flounder population, causing males to far outnumber females and reducing the spawning potential of the stock.

Climate change’s effects are also being felt is New England and the Mid-Atlantic region.  The stock of northern shrimp, once a relatively small but reliable fishery in northern New England, has collapsed, and a moratorium with no readily discernable end has been imposed on the fishery.  The same warming waters are probably impairing the recovery of depleted Atlantic cod stocks.  

On the other hand cobia, historically a southern fish that only rarely ventured north of the Chesapeake Bay, is becoming more and more common farther north; viewed as a beneficiary of the warming ocean, scientists believe that the center of cobia abundance on the East Coast will, before long, shift from the Chesapeake Bay to somewhere off New Jersey.  The recent explosion of black sea bass in New York and New Jersey can be attributed largely to warmer winter water temperatures at the edge of the continental shelf, where the fish spend the winter. 

Anecdotally, there has been an incursion of traditionally southern species into more northerly waters.  Here off Long Island, dolphin have always been available during the summer, but never in the numbers we’ve seen in the past decade, when the fish, once merely a target of opportunity for tuna and billfish anglers, became the target of directed fishing effort.  Just this year, while shark fishing in 20 fathoms of water, I’ve had anglers aboard my boat accidentally hook both cobia and wahoo, something that has never happened before.  A handful of anglers are now targeting both sheepshead and black drum in New York’s bays, while southern sharks, such as blacktips, spinners, and even the occasional bull, are showing up far more often than they did a decade ago.

Given such climate-driven changes, drafting a bill that would prohibit NMFS from looking into the effects of climate change on the nation’s marine fisheries would seem to rise to a sort of legislative malpractice.  Yet that’s just what legislators who are ideologically committed to rejecting all scientific evidence of climate change, and to carrying out the wishes of their corporate sponsors, are trying to impose on the agency right now.

It's hard to say where it will end. 

As the old saying goes,

“You just can’t fix stupid,”

so it’s not very likely that many in the House majority is going to bend.  Given the nature of politics, it’s probably not very likely that the minority party will reach out across the aisle, to the handful of rational majority members, to make needed changes in what is, and will remain, the majority’s budget bill.  More likely, they’ll insist on the House taking up their party’s bill from the Senate, a move that might make some obscure political sense, but will only guarantee additional gridlock.

Thus, the federal fishery management program is likely to be crippled by politicians more interested in scoring points for their side than in doing good work for the entire nation.

We can only contact our legislators, urge them to move, and hope that against all the odds, they take heed.