The Trump administration is eroding environmentally oriented fishing regulations in U.S. waters and opening up marine sanctuaries for anglers. Experts say the costs to ocean life could be disastrous.
In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive proclamation reopening nearly half a million square miles of Pacific ocean, coral reef and island habitats to commercial fishing. The order covers the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, stretching over Palmyra and Johnston atolls and Kingman Reef, among others.
Soon after, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a letter to commercial fishermen letting them know the monument was open for business.
The monument was established in 2009 by President George W. Bush, and expanded in 2014 by President Barack Obama. It’s frequented by rare and endangered animals such as melonhead whales, Hawaiian monk seals, and hawksbill and green sea turtles.
Trump is targeting the roughly 400,000 square miles of the preserve added by Obama.
“I’m sure that was a coincidence,” said David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney based in Honolulu, who is representing plaintiffs, such as Kāpaʻa, the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i and the Center for Biological Diversity in a lawsuit against the government.
Henkin and his clients argue the proclamation violates the 1906 Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to protect public lands as national monuments but doesn’t grant them the authority to strip protections from existing monuments. They also say the National Marine Fisheries Service’s attempt to greenlight fishing in the protected waters violates several environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.
Federal judges so far have sided with the environmentalists. Meanwhile, in June, the administration expanded its actions, inviting the fishing industry into
the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, on the northern end of the Hawaiian islands, the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument near Guam, and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, near American Samoa.
However, unlike his first attempt, Trump ordered the fisheries service to modify the regulations to determine what kinds of commercial fishing would be consistent with protecting the objects of scientific and historic value within the monuments.
The changes come “at a very high cost for these very sensitive marine areas that are some of the most important and critical marine habitats. They’re playing games in something that’s really very important that people have fought for decades to protect, and where these is bipartisan consensus,” Henkin said.
The administration is now looking to increase seafood production by jettisoning other environmentally oriented regulations and policies, said Ben Enticknap, Oceana‘s Pacific campaign director and senior scientist. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent regulatory priorities to the nation’s regional fishery councils, which environmentalists say reveal a direct attack on fishery management and ocean conservation.
“This is a big threat right now,” said Enticknap. “It could potentially have some short-term benefits for the fishing industry, but in the long term, what we’re risking is productive ocean habitats. We’re risking overfishing, so that in the future, there’s just going to have to be more constraints to recover populations once they’ve crashed.”
He pointed to a change NOAA is proposing that will lump the Pacific sardine fishery into one stock, ignoring the biology and unique behavior of different populations — different migration patterns and spawning locations — making them vulnerable to overfishing.
The fishing service says the different populations are genetically identical, and shouldn’t be managed separately, and the change will support more fishing.
In addition, NOAA is targeting areas in the pollock fishery that are restricted in order to protect endangered Stellar lions. Enticknap said those areas enable the large sea mammals room to feed and regrow their populations.
“But now, you’re going to open this door to get fishing back into some of these conservation areas? It’s a real threat to to the Stellar sea lions and the decades of conservation. It jeopardizes all of that,” he said.
He also pointed to the agency’s decision to forego limits on accidental catch of leatherback sea turtles in western Pacific longline fisheries.
Caps incentivize anglers to avoid catching animals they are not targeting, he said. “As soon as that goes away, that incentive is gone,” said Enticknap. “I mean, these animals are critically endangered. We need to be doing everything we can to protect them.”
“These regional priorities are a critical step in our efforts to fulfill the President’s vision of making the United States the world’s dominant seafood leader,” said Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s administrator, who became well known for his role in what was refered to as Sharpie-Gate. “We look forward to partnering with the councils to advance seafood competitiveness and support our American fishermen.”
In other environment news
Federal officials are rounding up and relocating 450 wild horses in the Inyo National Forest, near Mono Lake. They say the horses, which belong to the Montgomery Pass herd, are damaging the lake’s famed limestone tufas and pose a threat to drivers.
The move is contentious, with environmentalists supporting the removal, while tribes and horse lovers are heartbroken. Federal officials are using helicopters and ground vehicles to drive the horses into a large catch pen with holding corrals. They say the method is humane, although others contend it can cause injury and death.
The Boyle Heights fire, which has been causing problems since it first started on June 17, has stayed in the news:
Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe report that the air near the Lineage refrigerated warehouse carried astronomically high levels of smoke and soot — in some cases surpassing some of the worst air pollution during the Los Angeles County fires in January 2025.
On June 19, three days after the facility ignited, a temporary air quality monitoring station at Eastman Avenue Elementary School in unincorporated East Los Angeles measured 755 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particles for more than an hour, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Compare that to a Caltech air monitor in Pasadena, which recorded about 650 micrograms per cubic meter during last year’s Eaton fire.
According to Michael Jerrett, an environmental health professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the smoke contained not only particles, but gases, “many particularly toxic components … and we know little about how these mixtures affect health.”
Finally, turn your eyes east, across the Atlantic to Europe, which has been suffering under some of the highest temperatures ever recorded on the continent. Germany recorded more than 5,000 excess deaths during the late-June heat wave, according to preliminary data.
In the last full week of June, 5,486 more deaths were recorded than the 2022–2025 median, according to preliminary data from the Federal Statistical Office, also known as Destatis.
At the end of that week, temperatures had reached a national record of 107.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Another heat wave is expected to settle over the continent in the coming days.
