NMFS CUTS THREATEN MID-ATLANTIC ANGLERS, FOR-HIRE FLEET

 

It was just 15 months ago when the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was created by executive order, and unleashed Elon Musk and his army of tech bros on the nation’s administrative agencies, in an effort supposedly intended to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” by improving government technology, increasing government productivity, reducing federal regulations, and so reducing government spending. 

As a result, certain government contracts were terminated, at the same time that agencies were forced to engage in massive layoffs and staff reductions.

Somewhere amid all of the excitement of reducing government payrolls, the people responsible for all the cuts never considered—or never cared—that they needed to leave enough people behind to do the agencies’ work, and provide necessary services for the folks living and working in the United States.

One of those services is managing the nation’s living marine resources.  I’ve written before about how cuts to the National Marine Fisheries Service’s budget and personnel have hampered effective fisheries management.  But today, in the Mid-Atlantic region, we are facing a situation where a shortage of NMFS’ personnel—in particular those who draft and review fisheries regulations—is threatening to cause real harm to the region’s recreational anglers and to its for-hire fleet.

To understand what’s happening now, we have to go back to June 2022, when the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Interstate Fishery Management Plan Policy Board agreed to adopt the so-called “Percent Change Approach” for managing bluefish, summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass, an approach which abandoned the traditional approach of trying to constrain recreational harvest to the recreational harvest limit, but instead created a more flexible process that considered multiple factors when setting recreational landings limits.

Although the Percent Change Approach had strong support among both Council members and the Policy Board, it found critics among both the members of the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee and the fisheries conservation community (I freely admit that I was one of them).  To make the new approach more palatable to those critics, and also to allow for modifications once managers had gained some real-world experience with its workings, the motion adopted by the Council and Policy Board provided that the Percent Change Approach would sunset on December 31, 2025, unless it was extended by both management bodies.

At the April 2025 Council meeting, the Council and Policy Board approved a modified version of the Percent Change Approach, that would be used to manage all four species.  Council staff then drafted a framework document embodying the modified management approach, and submitted it to NMFS for approval on August 1, 2025.

Later, at the December 2025 Council meeting, where the Council met jointly with the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Management Board, both the Council and Management Board agreed to increase overall recreational black sea bass landings by 20%, set “non-preferred” coastwide recreational management measures for the species, and agreed that the states would be allowed to adopt management measures that differed from the non-preferred measures, provided that the ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Technical Committee found them to have conservation equivalence.

Allowing equivalent state measures to supplant the non-preferred management measures, even for anglers fishing in federal waters, had been accepted practice in recent years, so the states, acting through the ASMFC, quickly drew up new rules that took advantage of the black sea bass landings increase.

Unfortunately, due to severe understaffing at NMFS, proposed regulations implementing the modified Percent Change Approach have not yet been issued by the agency, and with black sea bass seasons in most states opening in May, it is clear that such regulations will not be issued before those seasons begin.

Thus, the federal management measures adopted at the December 2025 Council meeting, which assumed that regulations adopting the 2025 version of the Percent Change Approach would be in place before the black sea bass season opened, remain in limbo. 

While the states may go ahead and adopt regulations approved by the Council and Management Board in December for anglers fishing in state waters, anglers fishing for black sea bass in federal waters will have to comply with the federal non-preferred management option adopted at the December 2024 Council meeting.  Those regulations include a 5-fish bag limit, a 15-fish minimum size, and a season that runs from May 15 through September 8.

Party and charter boats holding a federal black sea bass permit will also have to abide by the non-preferred management measures, even when fishing in state waters.  Thus, each for-hire vessel owner will have to decide whether their interests are best served by retaining their federal permit, and being bound by federal rules, or surrendering that permit, and being limited to fishing only within state waters.

NMFS’ failure to act on the Council’s draft management measures will have a negative impact throughout the Mid-Atlantic, although that impact will differ from state to state. 

Here in New York, where the state has recently announced its intention to adopt black sea bass regulations that include a season that runs from May 16 through December 31, a 16-inch minimum size, and a bag limit of 3 fish through August 31, then 6 for the remainder of the year, falling back on the non-preferred federal rules won’t have any impact at all until September.  We can at least hope that NMFS will get its act together and issue the needed final regulation by then. 

However, if the agency fails to put the needed regulation in place, and the black sea bass season ends on September 8 rather than on December 31, it will be a major blow to the state’s party boat fishery, which relies heavily on black sea bass during the last months of the year.

In New Jersey, the impacts of NMFS’ failure to adopt the regulation implementing last year’s Council actions will be more immediate, and more severe.  There, the 2026 black sea bass regulations seem to favor the for-hire fleet over private boat anglers, with a 12 ½-inch size limit and a 10-fish bag limit from May 15-June 21, and again from September 23-October 31, after which it increases to 15 fish through the end of the year; during the summer season, from June 22-September 22, the black sea bass bag is only a single fish.  Increasing the size limit to 15 inches, a 2 ½-inch jump, while cutting the bag limit in half, for the first 38 days of the season, then shutting the season down completely after September 8, would undoubtedly slash New Jersey’s black sea bass landings, outrage party boat patrons, and cause substantial financial harm to the for-hire fleet.

Similar harm could be expected in the southern Mid-Atlantic, where black sea bass regulations have long been more liberal than they are in New York and southern New England, and the fishery is typically prosecuted in federal waters.  The contrast between the federal rules and Maryland’s 12 ½-inch size limit, 15-fish bag, and season that runs from May 1 through the end of the year is a case in point.

The irony of the situation is that NMFS has just issued it’s new National Saltwater Receational Fisheries Policy.  Three of the five “strategic goals” of that policy are to

“Promote sustainable recreational fishing that maximizes economic growth and supports coastal communities, tourism, and marine recreational industries,”

“Provide immediate, long-term, and accessible saltwater recreational fishing opportunities through science-based management,”

and

“Improve the responsiveness of fisheries management to current and future ocean conditions.”

Yet NMFS failure to issue final regulations approving a Council action that took place over a year ago, which was reflected in a draft management measure sent to the agency over eight months ago, will harm economic growth in the fishery, fails to support tourism or marine recreational industries, reduces recreational fishing opportunities, and is anything but responsive to a change in ocean conditions that led to an abundance of black sea bass.

It hardly adheres to the new Policy’s stated principles to “Improve Access” to and “Promote Participation” in the nation’s saltwater recreational fisheries.

The new Policy may consist of pretty words, laid out across six pages of pretty pictures and graphic art.  But if NMFS isn’t given adequate funding to do its job, that’s all that the policy is—pretty words and pictures that have little to do with reality.

It’s not NMFS’ fault, for given the agency’s very limited resources, it does the best that it can.

Yet, although the fault lies elsewhere, in more exalted if far less qualified hands, the impact on the angler and angler-related business is the same.

We deserve better, and ought not settle for less.