NOAA Opens Protected Monuments to Trawlers

The Trump administration's new fisheries roadmap would gut four Pacific marine monuments and rewrite the science standards that keep fish stocks alive.

By The Oceans Desk

NOAA has published an agency-level reform plan that would fast-track commercial fishing inside the Mariana Trench, Papahānaumokuākea, Rose Atoll, and Pacific Remote Islands national monuments—four protected areas covering over 1.1 million square miles that NOAA itself describes as "some of the last remaining relatively pristine ocean ecosystems." [1][2]

The document frames itself as an "operational roadmap" for President Trump's "Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness" executive order, signed in April 2025. [1]

The plan also confirms NOAA Fisheries will not mandate ropeless gear—technology designed to protect the last 350 North Atlantic right whales from entanglement—and will apply new Endangered Species Act reforms redefining the meaning of "harm." [1][2]

The tension here is structural: when the agency tasked with stewarding ocean health redefines what science it is required to follow, the erosion is baked into the bureaucracy rather than written into a single law.

Conservation lawyers are blunt about the stakes. Meanwhile, the National Fisheries Institute welcomed the plan, stating: "Calls for modernization and a return to a true risk-based regulatory structure, rather than the inertia of persistent bureaucratic expansion, could go a long way to mitigating the operational and administrative burdens the agency has committed to reduce." [1]

NOAA did not respond to direct questions about which scientific protections remain in place or whether the agency now prioritizes commercial profits over environmental stewardship. [1]