Saving Seafood

US bill would authorize commercial fishing in marine national monuments

June 4, 2026 — A bill being considered in U.S. Congress would prohibit presidents from prohibiting commercial fishing in marine national monuments, codifying that fishing activities in those areas must be regulated under the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA).

Successive presidents’ administrations have used the Antiquities Act to unilaterally establish national marine monuments or to change the protections granted within them, and commercial fishing groups have long bemoaned the use of that power to ban fishing within their boundaries. Former U.S. President Barack Obama prohibited commercial fishing within the nearly 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument when he established it in 2016, and later presidents have alternated between reallowing commercial fishing or banning it again; most recently, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order reauthorizing commercial fishing in the marine national monument.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Ocean observatories go dark off Pacific Northwest coast

June 4, 2026 — The Trump administration has quietly removed an array of floating ocean observatories from waters off the Washington coast, KUOW has learned.

Their removal is part of a national dismantling of a network of sophisticated data buoys in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency created in 1950 to support scientific research, announced in May that it had started what it called a “descoping” of its Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Those observatories monitor surface and underwater conditions 24/7 in what the science foundation calls “the most technologically advanced observational networks in the oceans.”

The moored buoys keep the pulse of the oceans as their temperature and chemistry rapidly change and provide real-time updates to mariners heading out into possibly dangerous waves. Autonomous “gliders” also roam the ocean, gathering data on the go.

Read the full article at KUOW

“Americans are buying American freedom fish, not communist fish” – US Senator Dan Sullivan touts work on securing extension of Russian seafood ban

June 4, 2026 — U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) took credit for the recently extended ban on Russian seafood during a Congressional committee hearing 2 June, stating that “Americans are buying American freedom fish, not communist fish from Russia.”

The hearing, titled “The Blue Economy: Advancing American Fisheries, Maritime Strength, and Coastal Economies,” took place more than a month after U.S. President Donald Trump opted to extend the ban on Russian seafood imports into 2027.

Read the full article at Seafood Source

7 states sue Trump administration over nearly $1 billion deal to halt offshore wind farm

June 3, 2026 — Seven states are suing the Trump administration over a nearly $1 billion deal to end French energy company TotalEnergies’ offshore wind development off the East Coast, accusing the deal of being “unlawful.”

In March, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with TotalEnergies to halt construction of the wind farms and redirect the investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives. The “landmark agreement” was described by the Interior Department as a way to lower energy costs and strengthen the nation’s energy security.

Attorneys general in seven states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleging the Trump administration illegally used nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the deal.

The coalition also accuses the deal of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior Department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases.

Read the full article at ABC News

Blue States Sue Trump Administration Over Offshore Wind Deal

June 3, 2026 — Seven Democratic-controlled states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its move to block a planned wind farm off the coast of New York.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn an extraordinary deal that the Trump administration reached in March with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. That agreement saw the government pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon plans to build the wind project off New York and another one off North Carolina.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement that the deal violated at least two federal laws and that it would harm New York’s economy and power grid.

“This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” she said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

Read the full article at The New York Times

Trump administration announces new set of Section 301 tariffs against major seafood trade partners

June 3, 2026 — The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has announced plans for a new set of sweeping Section 301 tariffs against 60 separate economies.

The USTR said it will impose duties on 59 different countries and the entire European Union for what it calls a failure to enforce prohibitions on the importation of goods produced with forced labor. In its publication to the Federal Register, the USTR said it will propose a tariff rate of between 10 and 12.5 percent depending on the commitments the countries or blocs have made to opposing forced labor.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Trump administration planning to dismantle Ocean Observatories Initiative

June 3, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is dismantling a deep-ocean observation system put in place over a decade ago, leaving gaps in scientific data that assists in everything from storm forecasting to fishery health.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) consists of six different underwater monitoring arrays that the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) said is the most advanced continuously-operated observing systems in the world. Using hundreds of different instruments, the arrays provide openly-accessible data to oceanographers, researchers, educators, and the public.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MASSACHUSETTS: It Was Supposed to Be a Lifeline for a Blue-Collar Town. Then Trump Returned.

June 1, 2026 — The dock that launched U.S. offshore wind is mostly empty now. The 200-foot-tall tower pieces that loomed like skyscrapers over a harbor of fishing trawlers are gone. So too are the house-sized gearboxes and turbine blades stretching the length of a soccer field.

The big turbine parts were supposed to represent a new era in a city where fish houses and abandoned factories line the waterfront. They were assembled here, sent out to sea and installed as part of Vineyard Wind, the largest renewable energy project built to-date east of the Mississippi River. All that was left on a recent April day were empty blade racks, a pair of red cranes and three broken blades.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this.

Vineyard Wind was supposed to be the first of many. Instead, it may be the only offshore wind project ever built in New Bedford.

This city of Portuguese, Latino and Cape Verdean residents is ground zero for America’s offshore wind industry, a test case of whether a blue collar fishing town can forge a new economic future by raising massive turbines out at sea.

Read the full article at Politico

Companies join a deep-sea mining rush after Trump executive order, as regulators fast-track permits

May 21, 2026 — In the year since President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to create a deep-sea mining industry from scratch, businesses have raised millions of dollars from investors, stock prices have soared and federal regulators have raced to fast-track a permitting process.

At least nine companies are in talks with the government for access to seabed minerals, according to an Associated Press review. Sections of the seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska could be auctioned for offshore mining this summer and through the fall.

All the action suggests the U.S. may soon give the green light for companies to commercially mine the seabed — something that’s never been done in international waters.

But a close look at some of the companies involved reveals uncertain track records and histories spattered with legal disputes, while major questions about how the minerals would be processed and refined remain unanswered. Watchers of the nascent industry are skeptical the promised riches will ever materialize.

Read the full article at The Associated Press