October 31, 2025 — The following was released by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy:
Family fishers overwhelmingly dominate the small commercial fishing industry, with businesses that span generations. In fact, the family of Advocacy’s very own Chief Counsel Casey B. Mulligan has been fishing off the coast of New York since the 1600s.
But today, American fishermen are burdened by excessive regulations that control where and how much they can fish, even when concerns about overfishing are dated or exaggerated.
“Generally speaking, the situation that small businesses are in requires regulatory loosening,” Greg DeDomenico, Fisheries Management Specialist for Lund’s Fisheries, said.
Over a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, driven in part by a recent Advocacy letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Advocacy staff met with fishermen from the Northeast to discuss how the Trump Administration could ease rules to benefit fishers and the economies they drive.
The first topic of conversation focused on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), mandated observers. According to federal law, fishermen are required to carry federal observers on their boats. These observers support stock assessments, assist in data gathering for fisheries management, and act as enforcement agents.
In 2020, NOAA issued a rule requiring some fishermen to pay for the observers, despite the law explicitly stating that the government was responsible for funding the program.
The costs that the National Marine Fisheries Service impose on small businesses are substantial: $710 per day per observer. Notably, the fishermen never objected to the presence of federal officials, just paying the observer’s salaries.
“We support observers,” said DiDomeneco. “We take a lot of observers. But we don’t want to pay them when the government should.” Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze LTD, has been fighting the economic impact of the observers rule since it was proposed in 2015.
“If the NMFS wanted more observer coverage than what Congress appropriated funding for,” Lapp said, “they made boats pay for it out of pocket.” This negates the Congressional power of the purse.
Lapp successfully compelled the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Councils to undertake an economic analysis, but only the Mid-Atlantic Council found a substantial economic impact to the fishing industry.
Not only does NOAA charge fishers for ecological and enforcement work, but they also mismanage funds legally dedicated to promoting and developing US fisheries and seafood markets. The fishermen who spoke with Advocacy described NOAA’s mismanagement of a federal fund created by the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act, which was designed to take tariffs on imported seafood and use that money to balance the seafood trade deficit by marketing US seafood and supporting economic development of commercial fisheries. Instead of using this money for its designated purpose, NOAA annually diverts the funds into its general operations account, while commercial fishing profits continue to decline.
The fishermen directly contrasted this with how the Department of Agriculture treats American beef and pork, which get dedicated advertising campaigns. Tyler Macallister, owner and captain of Off the Charts Sportfishing and commercial fisherman for 41 years, noted that doing so would allow fishermen to “develop the domestic markets that exist and get away from imports.”
Even small changes, like allowing American-caught scup to be rebranded as “Northern snapper,” would result in more robust markets for American seafood. But as Lapp noted, the FDA has rejected this idea in the past while giving deference to foreign imports sold under similar market names.
Another major concern for the fishermen came from coastal wind farms. Macallister, who has a background in marine biology and has researched offshore wind development, noted that wind turbine installation is undoubtedly damaging the marine environment, rendering fishing impossible.
“Wind farms diminish our access to the places we’ve been fishing for fifty years,” said DiDomenico. It is unacceptable to have a large foreign investment come to this country and displace fishermen without caring whatsoever.”
The stakeholders expressed frustration that their fishing grounds were treated differently from farmland. Lapp recalled that the Department of Agriculture recently issued a rule saying, “you cannot put windmills on prime US farmland.” “We should have one that says you can’t put windmills on prime fishing grounds,” Lapp countered.
Lapp also noted the safety risks of operating around a wind farm, which interfere with marine radar and Coast Guard search and rescue operations.
The consensus from the conversation was that it was time to better support US commercial fishermen.
“We’ve lost the plot,” said Jared Auerbach, CEO of Red’s Best Seafood. “When we’re interacting with all these agencies, it doesn’t feel like you have the same goal of healthy seafood and sustainable fish. Sometimes it feels like the goal is to keep your business small.”