June 5, 2025 — In April, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing commercial fishing from 50 to 200 nautical miles off the shore within the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument.
The national monument was founded as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in 2009 under President George W. Bush and then expanded in 2016 under President Barack Obama.
June 4, 2025 — U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating funding for the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund – a program that directs tens of millions of dollars annually toward supporting salmon populations along the West Coast.
The cut is part of the Trump administration’s planned cuts to NOAA; preliminary fiscal year 2026 budget documents outlined a USD 1.3 billion (EUR 1.1 billion) reduction to NOAA’s overall budget. Now, additional budget documentation released by the federal government shows which programs will be impacted by that cut, and salmon recovery efforts are one of the major government programs on the chopping block.
June 3, 2025 — Two weeks after the Trump administration abruptly allowed the Empire Wind project to resume, a coalition of project opponents and commercial fishermen filed a new federal lawsuit June 3 calling for the Department of Interior to block the project again.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – who imposed a stop-work order on Equinor’s project off New York April 16, then lifted it in mid-May – is named among as a defendant along with Equinor and the government of Norway, as a majority shareholder of the energy company.
June 3, 2025 — Republican support for offshore wind has flatlined across the federal government, but Capitol Hill’s only bipartisan caucus dedicated to the energy source is hoping to reverse that trend.
The House Offshore Wind Caucus, created in 2022, was pitched as a way to find bipartisan solutions to address the industry’s challenges and create policies to spur further growth of the renewable energy source.
It’s main leader, Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.), said in a recent interview that the caucus will remain active in the coming year to achieve those goals.
June 3, 2025 — The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has granted certain Section 301 tariff exclusions on some seafood items, giving the products another three months to avoid a higher 25 percent tariff rate.
The Section 301 tariffs stem from the first term of U.S. President Donald Trump, who first hit Chinese products with a 10 percent tariff in 2018. That move started Trump’s first trade war with China, which resulted in 25 percent tariffs being placed on a wide array of goods from China related to the Section 301 Investigation of China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation.
June 2, 2025 — A House hearing this week will scrutinize federal regulations of commercial and recreational fishing.
The hearing Wednesday before the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries will feature testimony from industry stakeholders and fishing community leaders from Alaska to New England.
Among those scheduled to appear are Rick Bellavance, chair of the coordinating committee for NOAA’s eight regional fishery management councils and owner of a Rhode Island charter fishing company.
May 30, 2025 — The U.S. Court of International Trade has ruled that U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to unilaterally raise tariffs are “invalid and cannot be implemented,” throwing the president’s ongoing trade negotiations into uncertainty.
However, the U.S. Department of Justice quickly appealed the ruling, and on 29 May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit temporarily stayed the trade court’s ruling while it considers motions from both sides.
May 30, 2025 — A 28 May decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT), which challenged the legal basis of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, as well as the Trump administration’s appeal of that decision, has major implications for U.S. importers and shipping sector stakeholders, Clark Hill Senior Attorney Kelsey Christensen told SeafoodSource.
The immediate consideration for shippers, Christensen said, is whether they need to be rushing imports into the U.S. at the moment.
May 29, 2025 — U.S. President Donald Trump has delayed implementation of a 50 percent tariff on goods from the European Union to 9 July, after first announcing they would go into effect 1 June.
Following a 25 May call with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump announced he would be pushing back the date. When questioned by a reporter 28 May, the president said the initial threat was needed to bring Europe to the negotiating table.
May 29, 2025 — Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a permit that will allow the first industrial-scale fish farm to begin operating in federal waters.
The pilot project, called Velella Epsilon, has been stalled for about six years; its approval follows an executive order signed by President Trump in April ordering the deregulation of aquaculture and the opening of some protected waters to commercial fishing.
It’s particularly significant because Velella Epsilon, which is expected to produce 20,000 red drum annually about 40 miles off the coast of Sarasota, Florida, has been at the center of a larger debate over farming the oceans for years.
On one side, environmental groups and coastal fishermen see any large-scale ocean farming of finfish as too risky, given past ecological disasters and the potential impacts on wild fisheries. On the other side, experts and advocates say we should find ways to farm more fish for climate benefits, to combat overfishing of wild species, and to reduce dependence on seafood imports.
Supporters of Velella Epsilon say it represents a new kind of open-ocean system that is designed specifically to eliminate the negative impacts of the offshore aquaculture operations of the past. This group has the support of powerful seafood corporations, grocers, restaurant chains, and their lobbyists.