May 30, 2025 — A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency responsible for managing fishery disaster assistance, takes too long to get relief into the hands of fishermen, and that’s costing coastal communities across the country.
Since 2014, NMFS has received 111 requests for fishery resource disaster assistance. For 56 of the most recently approved requests, the agency took between 1.3 and 4.8 years to disburse $642 million. The agency is altering the program in an effort to reduce the process to 1 year, the report stated.
The long delays have left states, Tribes, and fishing communities struggling in the wake of disasters like hurricanes, oil spills, and flooding. In one example, the 2019 Gulf of Mexico freshwater flooding event caused over $101 million in losses to Louisianans’ fisheries alone.
The GAO report highlights the systemic issues, including “inadequate communication about request status,” limited access to internal tracking systems, and a lack of clear guidance on how to prepare disaster requests on spend plans. “Providing more detailed information on its website would better inform requesters about the information they need to submit,” the report states.
NMFS has begun implementing statutory timelines added in the 2022 Fishery Resource Disasters Improvement Act (FRDIA), which could help shorten the disaster relief timeline to just over a year. Early signs show some improvement; the median time to make a determination dropped from 282 days for 2022 requests to 140 days for those submitted in the first half of 2024.
The GAO found that “no disaster requests had gone through the entire process to disburse funds to the requested since FRDIA’s additional timelines, as of August 2024.” In the meantime, communities are left hanging.