In the labyrinthine organizational chart of the U.S. government, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sits conspicuously within the portfolio of the Department of Commerce. Ocean research and weather monitoring have clear economic stakes, of course, but the responsibilities of the science-oriented agency — targeted for dismantling by the Trump administration for allegedly instigating “climate change alarm” — often seem better suited to the Department of the Interior, or perhaps nestled within the Environmental Protection Agency.
That is, until you start talking about the fisheries.
The United States is the world’s sixth-largest producer of wild-caught seafood, with the fishing industry supporting at least 2.3 million domestic jobs and generating around $321 billion in annual sales. After the National Weather Service, NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Service is the agency’s biggest arm, employing around 4,200 of the roughly 13,000 people who worked at NOAA before Elon Musk’s efficiency layoffs. The NMFS (as it’s known in the acronym-heavy parlance of NOAA) is tasked with managing, conserving, and protecting the nation’s fishing resources and the billions of pounds of domestic seafood harvested annually, along with state departments of natural resources and the Food and Drug Administration.
But like every other line office at NOAA, NMFS now faces cuts of up to 20% of its payroll, which could reduce its services and pass on unpleasant repercussions to seafood-loving Americans. At NOAA Fisheries’ offices in Narragansett, Rhode Island, and Woods Hole, Massachusetts — the latter being the oldest marine research station in the country — at least 20 staff members have already been laid off, The New Bedford Light reports. Though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed in his confirmation hearing that it was not his intent to “dismantle” the agency, people all over the climate science and forecasting communities fear that the cuts are effectively doing exactly that. (NOAA declined to comment for this story, citing long-standing practice against discussing internal personnel and management matters.)
“These actions are not the strategic moves of a government looking out for its populace,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator under President Joe Biden, said in a recent press call hosted by Washington Senator Patty Murray. “They are the unnecessary and malicious acts of a shambolic administration.”
Not all fisherpeople necessarily welcome NOAA into their lives, however. Many fishing communities around the U.S. have long felt neglected by the government, since wild-caught seafood isn’t eligible for traditional farming grants from the Department of Agriculture and it doesn’t qualify for the economic assistance directed toward domestic aquaculture, either. The problem is particularly acute in the case of shrimp, Americans’ favorite seafood, which is eaten by nearly half of the households in the country. Wild-caught shrimp is often more sustainable than domestically farmed shrimp, the latter of which is almost nonexistent, making up less than 1% of what’s on the market in the U.S. But American shrimpers face intense market pressures from the glut of farmed and often illegal foreign imports that make up 90% of the shrimp for sale in stores and restaurants, with little obvious intervention from federal monitors at NOAA or the FDA.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, kick them all out, burn it down, start fresh,’” Bryan Jones, the vice president of the South Carolina Shrimpers Association and a director of the United States Shrimpers Coalition, told me of he and his colleagues’ frustration with the agency’s priorities. “The entire seafood industry would like to see a mindset shift. What is the purpose of NOAA? Why do they exist?”
Though NMFS performs many functions, perhaps its most important is managing and conserving the nation’s fisheries, the geographic regions where particular stocks of fish are harvested commercially (for example, the Alaska pollock fishery is the nation’s largest commercial fishery, valued at $483.5 million). The agency hires observers to record what’s caught and discarded aboard commercial fishing boats. That data is then used to set quotas on how much of the given population can be harvested in a season, determined in collaboration with private industry partners at the nation’s eight regional fishery management councils. NOAA also prescribes mandatory precautions, such as the use of “turtle excluder devices” in cases where bycatch is a concern, like shrimping.
Though Jones spoke highly of all the individuals he collaborates with at NOAA, the behemoth agency can also move at what feels like a glacial pace. In 2018, for example, a winter freeze decimated the white shrimp stock in Charleston harbor, triggering $1 million in federal disaster relief for the affected shrimpers. But almost seven years later, much of that emergency money still hasn’t been distributed by NOAA. And even that amount was still far short of the $2 million in requests made by the Lowcountry shrimpers.
But there are also stark counterexamples of what can happen to fisheries when the data collected by NOAA falters or degrades, as is likely to happen if the layoffs continue apace. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic suspended NOAA’s annual Bering Sea bottom trawl survey, leading to gaps in the data about the snow crab population. Then, in 2021, following a marine heat wave, the snow crab fishery collapsed, meaning its population saw a decline of more than 90% and was too small to sustain a harvest. “Consequently, we don’t have a good idea of what [the snow crab] population looked like the year prior, in 2020, and we need that type of data to know how many fish and crabs we can catch each year, where the populations are going as the oceans change, and to keep track of environmental trends,” Rebecca Howard, a former research fish biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle who NOAA laid off, said on the virtual press call with Spinrad and Murray.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. fisheries were not in a good state; overfishing caused the populations of many of the country’s most iconic fish stocks, including flounder and cod, to collapse. Stricter limits on overfished stocks have allowed populations to recover in recent years. Today, the U.S. can boast of having “the best-managed fisheries in the world,” Sally Yozell, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans at NOAA, told me. “And there was a lot of pain that went into getting to that point,” she said. “It took a lot of science and a lot of pain by the fishermen,” who weren’t allowed to harvest certain species during the recovery efforts. Today, the agency is involved in managing more than 400 fish stocks.
But Yozell also pointed out that it is the balance between commerce and science that is crucial. “It’s not fair to say to a fisherman, ‘Okay, you go and guard your own hen house,’” she added. “I mean, they’ll fish as much as they can — and why not? It’s in their nature. That’s why we have openings and closings [of fisheries] that are science-based,” intended to prevent overfishing or population collapse.
If the quality of NOAA’s fishery management data suffers as it hemorrhages staff, the regional fishery management councils will likely err on the side of caution rather than risk a fishery collapse, which, if severe enough, could result in localized extinctions. “That could mean scaling back the amount of fish that could be harvested to take a more precautionary approach,” Sarah Poon, the associate vice president of Resilient Fishery Solutions at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. Sure enough, fishermen have already overfished Atlantic bluefin tuna off North Carolina this year because NOAA failed to close the fishery after the quota was reached — an uncharacteristic oversight that was apparently due to the agency’s layoffs, Reuters reports, and that will likely result in more conservative management of fisheries down the line.
The New England Fishery Management Council is already warning that the continued freeze at NOAA could delay the traditional May 1 opening of its groundfish fishery, and the valuable New England scallop fishery might also see delays as NOAA struggles to issue its standard regulations. Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, has warned that the layoffs could potentially disrupt the $320 billion annual salmon hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest if commercial fishing closures or delays continue to occur.
Despite his frustrations with the bureaucracy of NOAA, the South Carolina shrimper, Jones, said that fishing communities would be the first to acknowledge the importance of good data, science, common-sense regulations, and stock management. “We’re all environmentalists at the end of the day,” he said, pointing out that fishermen wouldn’t have jobs if pollution or overfishing endangered the shrimp population.
But while many at NOAA now fear for their livelihoods, the stakes for small fishing communities have long felt existential. “It’s not hyperbole to say we’re at a precipice,” Jones went on. “There’s a chance that we may not be around in a couple of years — it’s that bad.” Sales of South Carolina seafood have nearly halved since the early 2010s, and the number of shrimp boats on the water in Georgetown County, the “seafood capital” of the state, has done the same.
But if wild-caught shrimp vanish from the markets, it could mean an even heavier reliance on farmed imports. Foreign aquaculture, however, is rife with forced labor and human rights violations, rampant environmental pollution and habitat destruction, and serious contamination concerns. Other seafood sectors, like white fish, are contending with adversaries such as Russia mixing in foreign-caught fish with domestic fish during processing and labeling it American wild-caught, or with outright mislabeling — though it again falls on NOAA’s potentially compromised enforcement capabilities to verify that U.S. seafood is actually wild-caught in the U.S.
EDF’s Poon told me it’s the most volatile fisheries that are ultimately most reliant on NOAA’s data, a category she believes shrimp falls into given warming-related environmental pressures and harmful algal blooms. While she agreed that NOAA Fisheries could use some “fine-tuning and refinement,” Poon added that turmoil at the agency is “already upending some of these decision-making processes that we have,” for the worse.
And while the NOAA layoffs might be cathartic for some in the fishing industry, there is also no clear indication that a regime change in Washington will mean the reversal of fortunes for fishermen. “It’s like we’re viewed as something to be managed out of existence; that’s the perception we’ve had and the way we felt,” Jones said. “I see a lot of great scientists and folks that work on the ground with us and are very helpful, but from an agency standpoint — yes, that’s how we felt.”
But “I mean, we’ve never gotten a call from Howard Lutnick, either,” he said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Mario Tama/Getty Images