February 14, 2025 — A U.S. federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funding for foreign aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), temporarily frustrating the president’s efforts to shut down the agency.
At the beginning of February, members of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID headquarters, closed its offices, furloughed its employees, and shut down its funding.
February 14, 2025 — U.S. president Donald Trump announced that he would impose reciprocal tariffs on the nation’s trading partners on 13 February, prompting numerous trade experts to predict higher prices for American consumers.
Shortly after Trump announced the measures, Capital Economics, a global financial analytics firm, told the New York Times that it “predicts that the effective tariff rate on all U.S. imports could rise from less than 3 percent now to around 20 percent.” The effective tariff rate is the percentage of the price of imported goods that goes toward paying tariffs.
February 14, 2025 — Longtime NOAA staffer Emily Menashes is currently leading NOAA Fisheries amid a leadership gap following the resignation of Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries Janet Coit last month.
The appointment is part of a temporary churn of leadership positions at the U.S. Department of Commerce as leaders appointed by then U.S. President Joe Biden step down to make room for U.S. President Donald Trump’s picks. As the Biden administration came to an end in January, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad, and NOAA Fisheries head Coit all resigned, leaving the nation’s top fisheries management positions needing to be filled.
February 14, 2025 — The administration of U.S. Donald Trump has set plans in motion to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a move that some experts are warning will have long-lasting effects on the U.S.’s own seafood sector.
Kevin Fitzsimmons, an aquaculture specialist and an environmental science professor at the University of Arizona, has consulted on USAID aquaculture projects in Myanmar, among other locations, and said that the recent funding freeze will have negative ripple effects across the globe.
February 14, 2025 — NOAA’s James J. Howard Marine Sciences Lab in Sandy Hook is in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding, Rep. Frank Pallone said this week.
Pallone, a Democrat and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said $5 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding is unavailable which is putting jobs, research and critical infrastructure at the lab at risk.
The lab’s seawater intake supply infrastructure, essential for the lab’s core function, was set to be rehabilitated using IRA funds. Pallone said the freeze means the system is in jeopardy of total failure by April when contracts for critical maintenance staff expire. He said the system must now be manually shut down each night when maintenance staff leaves.
February 13, 2025 — Companies that committed to investments in U.S. offshore wind infrastructure and supply chains are scrapping their plans as the projects they were meant to serve face huge setbacks, including President Donald Trump’s plan to end federal support.
The pullback reflects the trickle-down effect of a dramatic downturn in the U.S. offshore wind industry over the past two years that has caused lengthy delays, cost increases and even failures of many of the nation’s proposed offshore wind farm projects. It could cost thousands of planned jobs and billions of dollars in investments.
February 13, 2025 — One of the requests made by the authors of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, is that President Donald Trump again shrink national monuments.
Whether he will remains to be seen, though the most likely candidates are Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, from which Trump sheared a combined 2 million acres during his first term, only to watch President Joe Biden restore the original boundaries as set by Presidents Barack Obama (Bears Ears) and Bill Clinton (Grand Staircase).
The authors of Project 2025 don’t want him to stop there. Indeed, the section on the Interior Department, written by William Perry Pendley, who was a longtime president of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation that worked to see federal lands turned over to states, maintains that Trump didn’t go far enough during his first term.
“Although President Trump courageously ordered a review of national monument designations, the result of that review was insufficient in that only two national monuments in one state (Utah) were adjusted,” wrote Pendley. “Monuments in Maine [Kathadin Woods and Waters] and Oregon [Cascade-Siskiyou], for example, should have been adjusted downward given the finding of Secretary Ryan Zinke’s review that they were improperly designated.”
The 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument encompasses a biologically robust area located about 100 miles southeast of Cape Cod National Seashore. It became the Atlantic Ocean’s first national monument when Obama established it. President Trump during his first term removed restrictions that kept commercial fishermen out of the monument.
February 13, 2025 — U.S. Representative Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) recently sent a letter to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump that offered simple advice on Trump’s tariff policies: To save American seafood, tax imports from China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Higgins shared the letter he sent to the president on social media platform X with the caption, “Protecting the American seafood industry requires aggressive action.”
February 11, 2025 — Seafood distributors are responding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s most recent trade announcement with caution, unsure how they will be affected by 25 percent tariffs imposed on foreign steel and aluminum.
While most said they didn’t expect to be directly affected by the metal tariffs, anxieties about inflation in the food industry in general remains high.
February 6, 2025 — Donald Trump’s supporters and opponents alike are giving the president credit for “killing” an offshore wind farm project along the coast of New Jersey.
An executive order pausing permitting for offshore wind projects cast doubt on that project’s viability, New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities indicated in a statement this week. It is indisputable that creating uncertainty in this market threw a wrench in the works. But as Politico confessed, the “challenges” that Governor Phil Murphy’s project encountered “include economic conditions beyond Murphy’s control and Trump.”