This is Part 1 of a two-part series on fisheries management and ocean governance under the second Trump administration, which took office Jan. 20. Part 1 looks at the potential impacts that cuts and deregulation at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could have on U.S. fisheries. Part 2 will look at the effects that changes at NOAA and in the U.S. government more broadly could have on international fisheries management and oceans governance.

The United States has long had one of the best systems of fisheries management in the world, supporting 2.3 million jobs and a relatively high number of healthy fish populations. Many experts attribute this to the management support, research and conservation work done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and complemented by a set of eight regional, multistakeholder councils that devise management plans.

And so while NOAA is perhaps better known to the general public for its weather forecasting work, it’s also one of the premier fisheries management agencies in the world. NOAA employees conduct stock surveys, set catch quotas, supervise hatcheries, observe vessel activity, enforce fisheries regulations, and open and close fishing seasons, in addition to conducting fundamental oceanic research.

Yet the agency’s ability to provide these services now faces multiple threats as the U.S. executive branch begins to implement a program of budget cuts, staff cuts, facility closures and deregulation. Many experts and former NOAA employees told Mongabay that the Trump administration’s moves have been poorly planned and will be disastrous for U.S. fisheries. They say the cuts have led to great uncertainty in the U.S. commercial fisheries sector, a $321 billion industry, and could destroy a wealth of knowledge on how to manage fisheries sustainably and ensure profitability.

“[T]hey are forcing out talented agency staff, cutting grants and cooperatives programs that do groundbreaking science and slashing budgets with no clear plan about what comes next,” Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, told Mongabay in an email. “It seems the goal is destruction but with no plan for what is to follow.”

On April 11, news media reported that the Trump administration planned to dramatically reduce NOAA’s overall budget, including cutting the fisheries budget by more than a quarter, eliminating fisheries grants for species recovery and habitat conservation, and transferring fisheries work to another agency. The proposed budget, laid out in an internal document the San Francisco Chronicle posted online, also makes cuts to oceanic research and other NOAA science programs that support fisheries management. On April 17, President Donald Trump issued an executive order ringing in “A New Era of Seafood Policy” that mandates a reduction in “regulatory burden,” arguing that “[f]ederal overregulation has restricted fishermen from productively harvesting American seafood.”

The latest administration moves follow months of turmoil at NOAA. Since it came into office on Jan. 20, the Trump administration, spurred on by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a quasigovernmental agency created by executive order, has made a series of staff cuts to NOAA along with other U.S. agencies and departments. More than 10% of NOAA positions have been vacated — many hundreds of workers, including a large number who work in fisheries — with more cuts expected to raise that figure to at least 19%.

The NOAA staff cuts are part of Trump’s deregulation and privatization agenda, which has hit the agency in multiple ways. In addition to staff cuts, NOAA employees face limits on the issuance of regulations, which are the “bread and butter” of fisheries management, as one expert put it. They also face the possibility of working with fewer facilities, as the administration pushes to sell buildings and terminate leases. And they’re dealing with a host of other administrative challenges, right down to a reported lack of toilet paper at the agency’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, and scientists cleaning toilets at a NOAA lab in Seattle.

Passing backward?

The White House Office of Management and Budget issued the internal document first reported April 11, known as a “passback” memo, to inform NOAA leaders of approved budgetary levels for fiscal year 2026. It states, however, that many of the changes are to go into effect within weeks. The proposed budget would cut NOAA’s budget from $6.13 billion annually to $4.46 billion, a 27% reduction.

Several of NOAA’s fisheries and oceans-related branches would be greatly affected by the plan. The National Ocean Service (NOS) budget would be cut roughly in half, to about $330 million, and the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) branch would be eliminated, with a fraction of its work retained but transferred to other NOAA branches. NOS conducts coastal surveys and manages restoration sites after oil spills, among other roles, while OAR is the agency’s main research arm. The NOS cuts include the apparent elimination of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, which Meredith Moore, senior director of the fish conservation program at the Ocean Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based NGO, likened to a set of national parks on the coasts, including in key parts of the Chesapeake Bay. The OAR cuts include the apparent elimination of the Sea Grant program, which runs coastal education and economic programs through dozens of universities. Moore told Mongabay Sea Grant programs were widely popular, offering support to local communities, and it would be “rough to see those go.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service, also called NOAA Fisheries, is the main fisheries regulator. Its budget would be cut by 28%, from more than $1.1 billion to about $790 million. The memo calls for NOAA Fisheries’ work to “prioritize permitting and consultation activities in order to support Administration priorities and unleash American energy.” The plan explicitly and entirely cancels funding for Species Recovery Grants related to endangered species, as well as for other conservation work. It eliminates the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, which Daniel Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Washington, told Mongabay would be “catastrophic to efforts to restore degraded habitat” and build back the region’s iconic salmon populations. The plan also reassigns certain NOAA Fisheries functions dealing with the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which normally focuses on terrestrial and freshwater species.

Moore said she was “deeply concerned” about the passback memo. NOAA’s programs “feed and inform each other” and removing some would make the system dysfunctional, she said.

“Collectively, these cuts would be devastating to the seafood and aquaculture industries, make our food and families less safe by eliminating important monitoring and forecasting services, result in dirtier beaches and waterways, seriously harm states and communities by ending programs that support their well-being, and severely damage our nation’s leadership on science,” she said.

The plan requires congressional approval, and there is a history of Congress declining to approve presidential NOAA passback plans, according to Michael Sissenwine, a former director of scientific programs at NOAA Fisheries. But he told Mongabay he wasn’t all that confident that this Congress will assert its independence from the White House and block the passback plan, which he also called “devastating.”

The plan fits broadly with the plans laid out in a Project 2025 manifesto, a blueprint for a possible second Trump administration that was produced by right-wing groups, chiefly the Heritage Foundation, in 2023. The manifesto calls for NOAA to be “dismantled,” calling the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It calls for downsizing OAR and streamlining NOAA Fisheries by eliminating “overlap” with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The manifesto also states that the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act are being “abused” to the detriment of U.S. fisheries.

Cutting staff

The Trump administration has cut at least 56,000 federal jobs since January, while another roughly 76,000 federal employees have taken buyouts to leave their positions, according to The New York Times.

The staff cuts at NOAA, which had 12,224 full-time employees as of 2024, have come in multiple forms. About 500 NOAA employees opted to resign and accept deferred resignation buyouts following a “fork in the road” offer from the federal government in late January. About 800 NOAA probationary employees were then fired on Feb. 27; some were reinstated following a court injunction, then re-fired on April 10 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the injunction. Additionally, the Trump administration asked NOAA leaders to identify 1,029 positions for potential “reductions in force,” the results of which haven’t yet been made public. And further cuts are reportedly in the works: A large group of NOAA employees has been offered early retirement and new buyouts, which many in the group are expected to accept, according to former NOAA staff with knowledge of the process. All told, it appears at least 2,300 employees are being lost, 19% of the agency’s 2024 staff — and more cuts may yet come. Little is known about the fate of private contractors NOAA engages, whose numbers before Trump took office were in the thousands and could be as high as the number of full-time employees, experts estimated.

It’s not clear how many of the recently departed employees were from NOAA Fisheries, which had 2,931 full-time employees as of 2024, making it the second-largest NOAA branch, after the National Weather Service. But former NOAA staff told Mongabay they believe the branch’s losses have been roughly proportional to NOAA’s as a whole.

Even the firing of a single NOAA Fisheries employee can have large consequences. In Washington state, the release of millions of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) into Puget Sound from almost a dozen hatcheries is in doubt this month because the NOAA employee who signed off on compliance with the Endangered Species Act was fired, according to The New York Times.

Janet Coit, who directed NOAA Fisheries from 2021 until January, told Mongabay the reduction in staff size was “totally nonstrategic.”

“It is haphazard, and it’s touching down in erratic ways and causing turmoil and uncertainty in how basic needs will be met,” Coit said.

Deregulating fisheries

Federal budget and staff cuts have been coupled with deregulation, which the April 17 executive order kicked into high gear. Trump mandated that deregulatory action be taken within 30 days to increase production, enhance profitability and prevent fisheries closures. His order calls for an “America First Seafood Strategy.” But Moore argued that it would “weaken, not strengthen, our fishing industry by increasing the risk that overfishing drives our fish stocks into decline, effectively taking healthy U.S. seafood off the menu.”

“The U.S. fishing management system already maximizes catch to the limit that science says is sustainable,” she said in a statement.

The executive order also addresses “unfair” fisheries trading practices by foreign countries and calls for a comprehensive seafood trade strategy that combats illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and forced labor in the seafood industry — measures that scientists, conservationists and fishers largely support. At least one U.S. House member from the opposition Democratic party praised Trump’s move, as did the trade group representing the U.S. shrimp industry, which competes with less-regulated overseas producers.

However, Trump’s critics argued that even those parts of the executive order that were agreeable to them wouldn’t be achievable under his leadership.

Trump’s executive order “has some positive goals, but they are empty words without the staff expertise to drive them forward. The steep reductions proposed in the budget ‘passback’ and terminations to date are cutting the very resources necessary to achieve the aims of that EO,” Coit said in an email, referring to the executive order. “A decimated NOAA workforce simply will not have the tools to implement the EO.”

The executive order also mandates a review, within 180 days, of marine national monuments to determine if they should be opened to commercial fishing. And in a separate executive order issued the same day, and apparently without such a review, Trump went ahead and opened the vast majority of one of the those monuments to commercial fishing: the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, a marine protected area larger than Texas. The move drew fierce criticism from advocates.

These pronouncements were just the latest in a three-month deregulatory spree by Trump. He issued an executive order with a “10-to-1” rule that requires 10 regulations to be eliminated for every one that’s instituted by any federal department or agency. He also issued a 60-day regulatory freeze on Jan. 20 that had an apparent impact on U.S. fisheries because even many routine agency actions are considered regulations, often filed in the Federal Register. The freeze expired on March 21 and on March 26 the administration declared that hunting and fishing were exempt from the 10-to-1 rule, but some impact had already been felt.

For instance, bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) catch off North Carolina exceeded its quota by 25% in February after NOAA failed to order a stop to fishing when the quota was reached due to the regulatory freeze, according to Reuters. NOAA did eventually close the fishery on Feb. 28, but the delay drew criticism from conservationists as well as fishers in the northeastern U.S., who worry that their bluefin tuna catch will be affected later in the year. John McMurray, a bluefin fisher in New York, told Reuters he expected to pay a price for the management mistake.

“It’s hard for me to believe we’re not going to get punished up here in New York and New England for that,” McMurray said.

Other commercial fishers across the country have expressed concern about chaotic management in various fisheries, both to journalists and at an April 2 congressional forum. John Ainsworth, a Rhode Island-based squid fisher, expressed fear that stocks could be wiped out.

“The federal managers for the squid fishery are supposed to be slashed and without them, when do we know when the seasons open?” Ainsworth told Reuters. “When will they decide how much of the quota is caught?”

On March 4, 170 U.S. fishing businesses and associations, largely small-scale and community-based, wrote to Trump administration officials requesting regulatory stability, saying that “our industry relies on accurate fish population surveys and their timely interpretation” and is “heavily dependent on the regulatory process.”

The New England scallop fishery opened on time on April 1, after some uncertainty, but did so using “default” regulations from 2024 rather than updated rules. The New England groundfish fishery, which includes Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), normally opens on May 1 with a rules notice published 30 days in advance. No such notice has yet been published this year, leaving fishers uncertain about when they can get to work. Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, told Mongabay it was unclear when the groundfish fishery would start and whether federal funding for fisheries observers, who monitor and collect data on vessels, will come through. NOAA has in the past paid for 100% coverage of New England groundfish vessels, but if that funding program is terminated, fishers will be required to pay for observation themselves, with current rules stipulating that at least 40% of vessels are observed. This would be a hit to fishing businesses and to oversight of the fishery, experts say.

West Coast fisheries have also seen immediate impacts. On April 11, a NOAA regional administrator announced at a Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting that a program to reduce whale entanglements in fishing gear would be dialed back to include fewer species and fewer fisheries, according to Geoff Shester, California campaign director at Oceana, a conservation NGO.

“This not only harms whales, but also the fishing communities who now face increased risk and uncertainty,” Shester told Mongabay in an email.

Vacating the premises

The Trump administration seeks not only staff cuts and deregulation at NOAA, but also to reduce the agency’s physical footprint.

The administration’s plan laid out in the passback memo is to “eliminate funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.” This would presumably include, for example, ocean research centers in Florida and Washington state that are part of NOS. The plan also explicitly defunds the work of NOS’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, which has research labs in Alaska, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina.

It’s not clear what the passback plan means for NOAA Fisheries facilities: five regional offices, six science centers, and more than 20 labs across the country and in U.S. territories. But earlier reports indicated that it’s the branch of NOAA that stands to be impacted the most from facility closures.

The General Services Administration, acting under the reported orders of Trump and Musk, has since January pushed for the closure of NOAA and other agency buildings via both sales and lease terminations. Democrats on the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee on March 14 published a letter with a list of 34 NOAA buildings they said were targeted by the Trump administration; 23 of the them are NOAA Fisheries buildings.

One of the facilities targeted for lease termination is in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod; it’s part of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. Its closure would cause disruptions to NOAA programs, a recent former employee there told local media. The facility holds about 70 employees and walk-in freezers that hold a wide variety of marine life used to train fisheries observers.

The staff cuts, regulatory changes and facilities downsizing are not easy for the public to track, raising questions about the transparency of the Trump administration’s moves. There is no government website or public document that tracks the employment figures or layoffs at NOAA or other agencies.

Sally Martinelli, a spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, told Mongabay in an email that the agency wouldn’t comment on staff cuts per a long-standing policy of not discussing internal and management matters. She also said the question of downsizing buildings was currently “in flux.”

“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” Martinelli wrote.

Neither the Department of Commerce’s main office, the White House Office of Management and Budget, nor the General Services Administration responded to requests for comment from Mongabay; the Department of Government Efficiency couldn’t be reached.

Representatives of the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency have said that budget and staff cuts are necessary to reduce government waste and fraud, that deregulation is necessary to combat inflation and drive job growth, and that selling federal buildings and terminating leases will save taxpayer money.

An uncertain future

Along with the budget cuts proposed in the passback memo, there have been immediate budget and administrative changes at NOAA, including reports of credit card freezes at federal agencies and limits on travel for NOAA staff, which could affect a range of the agency’s domestic services, such as conducting population surveys, as well as international work (which will be covered in Part 2 of this series).

Lutnick, the commerce secretary, is personally approving all NOAA contracts and contract extensions over $100,000 — an unprecedented degree of direct oversight that’s causing an administrative bottleneck and “throwing the agency into chaos,” according to National Public Radio (NPR). The bottleneck has affected NOAA Fisheries, where contracts for “routine services” are being subjected to Lutnick’s approval, jeopardizing the implementation of updated catch limits, NPR reported.

Lutnick terminated two key advisory committees to NOAA on Feb. 28: the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee (MAFAC) and the Coastal Area-Based Management Advisory Committee. The committees were made up of stakeholders such as commercial and industrial fishers, Indigenous groups, academics and conservationists. Critics of the administration say these groups lost a decision-making voice as a result.

Sarah Schumann, a deckhand in both Rhode Island and Alaskan fisheries who served on MAFAC, said at the April 2 congressional forum that NOAA was being ruined by “oligarchs” like Elon Musk.

“How can NOAA possibly ever enter the kind of partnership with working people in coastal communities that I envisioned when I joined MAFAC, when the agency is being terrorized by people who have no concept of what honest work is?” Schumann said.

Another advisory body to NOAA, the American Fisheries Advisory Committee (AFAC), which is largely made up of industry members, remains in place, but its primary role — recommending the allocation of Saltonstall-Kennedy grant funding — could be eliminated, at least for 2025, if the Trump administration withdraws the funding, which industry members fear will happen.

The Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program, started in 1954, uses import duties on marine products to boost American fishing interests, including research and development projects. The program’s advocates say it’s based on principles that align with Trump’s position on tariffs. Matt Alward, an Alaska salmon fisher and AFAC’s chair, told Mongabay that the program was a “true America First mission.” The program is widely popular even if many industry members argue that too much of the funding goes to NOAA administrative work rather than more direct industry support. Martinelli of NOAA Fisheries told Mongabay that the agency is in the process of developing its spending plan for fiscal year 2025, and that no final determinations have been made regarding Saltonstall-Kennedy funding.

The many funding question marks over NOAA have left experts concerned, especially in light of climate change and other threats to the ocean. Coit, the former NOAA Fisheries director, said the mounting challenges that the agency faces require investments for the future.

“We needed more people, not less,” Coit said. “The changes that are happening in the ocean are rapid.

“The challenges have grown when it comes to making science-based decisions,” she added. “And so it’s with dismay I’m seeing a lot of these things halted in their tracks.”

Banner image: Albacore (Thunnus alalunga) fishing offshore of Oregon. Image courtesy of NOAA Fisheries. 

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