In July, the Trump administration relegated endangered leatherback turtles, sea lions and whales to mere collateral damage in its race to profit from the oceans. Now, fisheries science is in the government’s crosshairs.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered species and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.
The agency-level reforms serve as a self-proclaimed “operational roadmap” to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.
On the table: opening marine national monuments to commercial fishing operations, scaling back critical habitat designations to focus more on the downstream economics of conservation and weakening decades of peer-reviewed science.
“If you asked AI to come up with a plan to hollow out marine ecosystems and impoverish coastal communities, it would look a lot like the one NOAA just put out,” said Andrea Treece, the senior attorney in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, in an email to Inside Climate News. “The agency is taking a sharp turn away from science.”
