Oceana Sounds Alarm Over Potential Changes to NOAA
Oceana, an international advocacy entity focused on ocean conservation, voiced concerns on Feb. 10 about threats to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if the Trump administration moves to downsize the agency.
“NOAA is the federal agency that manages our national fisheries, monitors and forecasts our weather, charts our oceans and protects our coastal communities and infrastructure,” Beth Lowell, vice president for U.S. Oceans at Oceana, said. “Millions of people rely on healthy oceans and without a strong NOAA, our oceans, Great Lakes and coastal economies will suffer severe consequences.”
Scaling back NOAA’s resources could lead to consequences including overfishing, delayed life-saving alerts about severe weather and allowing endangered or threatened marine wildlife to go extinct, she said.
The Trump administration on Feb. 4 nominated Neil Jacobs to again lead NOAA, another of the federal agencies that appeared targeted for deep cuts. Jacobs was the acting head of NOAA during the first Trump administration.
During Trump’s first term, Congress resisted the president’s efforts to cut NOAA funding, but as of early February it was still undetermined whether Trump would move more aggressively in his second term to make significant changes in the agency.
The Heritage Foundation, in its Project 2025 blueprint for the incoming administration, labeled NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and said the agency should be dismantled.
Meanwhile news outlet Politico reported on Feb. 6 that the Trump administration had instructed the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to halt at last two studies sponsored by NOAA.
According to Politico, that termination order immediately curtailed an ongoing study on fisheries management, with part of the research focused on determining whether fishing permits and quotas are fairly and equally distributed to people across the country.
Source: https://fishermensnews.com/oceana-sounds-alarm-over-potential-changes-to-noaa/
