- The United States has long been an international leader in fisheries and oceans science, with influence at international fora that it has sometimes wielded to support conservation measures and crackdowns on illegal fishing.
- However, U.S. influence at fisheries and oceans fora appear to be waning during the second Trump administration, which could compromise fisheries health and marine conservation, experts say.
- The administration, which took office Jan. 20, has begun to institute a program of budget and staff cuts at U.S. departments and agencies that work on fisheries and oceans governance, while turning away from or undercutting multilateral organizations.
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on fisheries management and oceans 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 looks 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 been an international leader in fisheries and oceans science. At multilateral fisheries meetings, the country has often had the largest delegation, even when its industry has little at stake, and U.S. scientists chair numerous committees. This gives the U.S. influence that the country has wielded to advance the interests of its commercial fleet, along with, at times, conservation measures and crackdowns on illegal fishing in international waters.
However, U.S. influence at these and other oceans-related fora appear to be waning during the second Trump administration, which could compromise fisheries health and marine conservation, experts say. The administration, which took office Jan. 20, has begun to institute a program of budget and staff cuts at U.S. departments and agencies that work on fisheries and oceans governance while retreating from or undercutting multilateral organizations.
“With the loss of personnel and the loss of U.S. leadership in those areas, I think the resources will suffer for commercial purposes as well as for conservation purposes,” Monica Medina, who served as assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs from 2021 to 2023 under former President Joe Biden, told Mongabay.
Cuts to staff and budgets
The Trump administration has cut tens of thousands of federal jobs in recent months, including hundreds that deal with oceans and fisheries, while announcing major budget cuts that also affect the sector.
For instance, the administration has so far slashed more than 10% of the jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with plans to increase that number to at least 19%, while proposing a budget reduction of 27% to the agency, including a proportional cut to its fisheries programs. It’s announced a major restructuring of the State Department and plans to reduce the department’s U.S.-based staff by 15%. Although Medina’s former office at the department, the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, seems to have been spared thus far, according to the new organizational chart, it could face staff or budget cuts. And the administration has effectively eliminated the Agency for International Development (USAID), terminating more than 99% of staff and scrapping almost all programs, including for fisheries work in developing countries. The cuts are being challenged in a number of ongoing lawsuits.
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. “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.
NOAA didn’t reply to specific questions about international fisheries and oceans governance, and the White House didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article. Members of the Trump administration have said that staff and budget cuts are necessary to reduce government waste and fraud.
“I think these cuts are inconsistent with the interests of all Americans and will not reduce the deficit,” Medina said in an email. “I think these cuts will give China an upper hand globally on the nearly 50% of the planet that is high seas.”
Retreat from fisheries management
The U.S. has already reduced its participation in international oceans and fisheries meetings. The Trump administration didn’t send a delegation to the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdictions (BBNJ) Agreement Preparatory Commission, held April 14–25 in New York. The meeting focused on governance and finance issues for BBNJ, also known as the “high seas treaty.” BBNJ was signed by the U.S. and more than 100 other nations in 2023 but hasn’t yet entered into force because only 21 of the 60 nations needed have ratified it, not including the U.S. The treaty is regarded as key to long-term marine conservation efforts in the vast swaths of the ocean outside of any nation’s control, and numerous details are still being negotiated.
The Trump administration also did not send U.S. representatives to this year’s Our Ocean Conference, a high-profile marine conservation event originally launched as an initiative of the U.S. State Department that is taking place in South Korea from April 28-30.
Moreover, the U.S. has sent smaller than usual delegations to regional fisheries management organization (RFMO) annual meetings. RFMOs are multilateral organizations that govern fishing in the high seas and sometimes also within countries’ national waters. The U.S. participates in 19 RFMOs or RFMO-like bodies as a member or an observer. It had a reduced presence at two of the important RFMO meetings it usually attends that have taken place so far in 2025, according to multiple sources: At the South Pacific Regional Fishery Management Organisation meeting in February, the U.S. had only four representatives — it normally sends more than a dozen, mostly from NOAA but also from the State Department and the Coast Guard — and only one delegate for the preliminary meetings. And at the North Pacific Fisheries Commission meeting in March, no more than five U.S. representatives attended, down from eight last year.
In addition to the annual meetings, RFMOs also hold key committee meetings at least once per year, notably on science and compliance, the latter dealing with vessels that have violated fishing rules. The U.S. has long been heavily engaged in such meetings, with U.S. scientists often chairing the committees. But experts told Mongabay the U.S. seems poised to reduce that engagement, with potentially negative business and conservation outcomes.
“Some of the smaller intersessional meetings are actually negotiations [in which] progress is made,” Kelly Kryc, who until January was deputy assistant secretary for international fisheries at NOAA, told Mongabay. “So, it’s not just the big annual meetings. It’s too late if you show up at the annual.”
“When a party doesn’t show up, they don’t have a voice,” added Kryc, who was the U.S. head of delegation at annual meetings of two of the most prominent RFMOs: the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.
“We have the strongest fisheries management in the world, which makes our fisheries sustainable and provides certainty for our fishing industry,” she said. “The rest of the world doesn’t want to operate [at] the same level that the United States does, but our fishermen would like that to happen, and so compliance is … where the United States has the best opportunity to hold other countries accountable for what they agreed to.”
The new administration’s “America First” approach may further constrain its ability to lead at RFMOs, some experts say.
“The entire point of an RFMO is to collaborate and to find common ground,” Ryan Orgera, global director of Accountability.Fish, a Virginia-based advocacy group, told Mongabay. “That’s sort of Pollyannaish — I understand it doesn’t always happen that way. But if the starting point simply is, ‘We’re overtly here to fight for what’s good for this one nation,’ it certainly will make negotiations more difficult.”
Breakup with multilateralism
The Trump administration has disengaged from many U.N. institutions, withdrawing from, for example, the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, while disavowing the sustainable development goals. The oceans have been no exception.
Dramatically, on April 24, President Donald Trump broke with global governance norms by issuing an executive order that allows the U.S. to grant permits for deep-sea mining in international waters. The order, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” circumvents the U.N.-affiliated International Seabed Authority (ISA) and amounts to a full-scale attack on multilateralism, his critics say. Almost every country in the world has ratified the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty that established the ISA as the sole authority to grant such permits. Although the U.S. is an exception, its delegates have attended ISA meetings for decades, suggesting it intended to honor the ISA’s authority.
Trump’s order, however, allows deep-sea mining companies to apply to NOAA for permits, in an expedited process, rather than seeking them through the ISA process, which is still being finalized due to complicated negotiations over royalty fees and environmental standards. To the industry’s frustration, the ISA has issued exploration permits but not exploitation permits, and so far, no commercial-scale deep-sea mining has taken place anywhere in the world. And so, companies have turned to the Trump administration.
More than 30 countries, many of them longtime U.S. allies, have called for a ban, moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, which scientists and conservationists say would threaten little-understood benthic ecosystems, with potentially dire consequences. For the industry, the top area of interest is a section of the central Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone that contains resources such as nickel, cobalt and rare earth minerals.
A spokesperson for the State Department said that, along with other recent oceans-related executive orders, the deep-sea mining order would have positive effects.
“As demonstrated in his Executive Orders ‘Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,’ ‘Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness,’ and ‘Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,’ President Trump is prioritizing the revitalization of domestic maritime industries, efforts to combat IUU [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing, and establishing the United States as a global leader in responsible seabed mineral exploration and processing,” the spokesperson, who declined to be named, said in an emailed statement to Mongabay.
The administration’s hostility to international environmental rules has also been evident in other oceans fora. In early April, the U.S. delegation withdrew from decarbonization talks at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. body that regulates maritime transport, and threatened retaliatory action if any of its ships are assessed fees for climate emissions.
Experts said the effects ripple out to other longstanding environmental treaties reached under the auspices of the U.N. The result could be reduced enforcement of wildlife trafficking under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and a slowdown of efforts to protect 30% of the world’s land and sea by 2030 (“30×30”) under a Convention on Biological Diversity agreement, they said. Although the U.S. is not party to that agreement, former President Biden pushed the 30×30 initiative, which involves the creation and expansion of marine protected areas, in an executive order in his first month in office. Trump rescinded that order on Jan. 20, and in April opened most of a Texas-sized marine protected area in the Pacific to commercial fishing.
Tough talk on illegal fishing
On April 17, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order on fisheries, part of which dealt with addressing “unfair trading practices” in the seafood sector, including IUU fishing. It calls for a review of the practices of major seafood-producing nations to assess the role of IUU fishing and forced labor in their supply chains and new efforts to prevent IUU-caught seafood from entering the U.S. IUU fishing costs the global economy between $15.5 billion and $36.4 billion per year, according to an often-cited 2017 report by Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Critics of Trump acknowledged some good intentions in this executive order that could bolster U.S. influence in international fishing practice, but they said his administration wouldn’t be able to carry them out. It “has some positive goals, but they are empty words without the staff expertise to drive them forward,” Janet Coit, who directed NOAA Fisheries under the Biden administration, from 2021 until January, told Mongabay. She said the staff and budget cuts would mean fewer resources to achieve such anti-IUU aims.
The Biden administration itself pushed an anti-IUU agenda. The push, which involved more than a dozen U.S. agencies, focused on strengthening RFMO rules, improving enforcement regimes and preventing seafood of dodgy provenance from entering the U.S. market.
While the Trump administration professes to counter IUU fishing in its executive order, it has cut numerous longstanding anti-IUU programs. USAID had long been one of the largest funders of marine conservation in developing countries, spending about $40 million per year, about half of it combating IUU fishing, according to agency documents. On Jan. 20, the agency had marine conservation programs running in more than 25 countries, many of which contributed to the interagency fight against IUU. Now, only one remains, in the Philippines, and it’s scheduled to expire in December. Experts say the consequences will be huge. Funding cuts in Ghana, for example, threaten years of progress against illegal fishing by Chinese-owned vessels and toward the development of the country’s first marine protected area.
Another way the U.S. has long tried to influence international fishing practices is by restricting what foreign seafood can enter the U.S. market. That’s done largely through the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP), which is one of the only government traceability systems in the world and covers nearly half of seafood entering the U.S. to try to ensure it’s not of IUU origins. Trump’s April 17 executive order calls for improving SIMP but seems to mandate the reconsideration of a Biden-era NOAA action plan that would expand SIMP to cover all incoming seafood, potentially undercutting progress on what experts say are much-needed reforms.
Sally Yozell, director of environmental security at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told Mongabay there was “no reason” to throw out the action plan.
More broadly, Yozell said she regarded Trump’s oceans and fisheries moves with dismay. She said NOAA was “the little engine that could” — doing a huge amount of work with a slim budget and lean staffing — and the administration’s cuts were “destroying the wealth of knowledge that has amassed over the years of how to manage fisheries, to make them sustainable and profitable, to the point that we have the best in class in the world.”
Banner image: A school of anthias (Pseudanthias bartlettorum) and a school of white tip sharks at Jarvis Island, one of seven U.S.-controlled islands and atolls around which the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument is based. President Donald Trump opened most of the monument to commercial fishing in an April 17 executive order. Image courtesy of NOAA.
Sweeping cuts and deregulation imperil U.S. fisheries, experts warn
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