The West Coast’s most important fisheries manager has voted to remove 47 stocks of groundfish from active federal management. Amid massive cuts to federal budgets for science and regulatory activities, members of the Pacific Fishery Management Council were told their 50-year-old system is unsustainable.
The National Marine Fisheries Service instructed the council to use a specific process — a matrix examining risk versus value — to evaluate the more than 500 stocks they manage and to narrow the scope of their responsibilities. That work started with groundfish.
Merrick Burton is the executive director of the council, which oversees West Coast and Idaho fisheries. He said cuts from the Trump administration have slashed the staff of the federal regulators and scientists they work with.
“In our region, the estimates are around 40% of their staff, which is staggering,” he said. “So this has led to a national conversation of: how many species can we really manage? And we need to prioritize more.”
The Pacific fishery council is one of eight credited with reducing overfishing, rebuilding stocks and boosting sustainability across Alaska and the West Coast in the years since 1976, when Congress adopted the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
Burton said this discussion has been one of the most challenging of his tenure. All the councils have expressed concerns about how the effort is being rolled out, sending a joint letter to National Marine Fisheries Service headquarters in February.
“It's very clear that this is a very difficult and fraught exercise, and people are very concerned,” Burton said.
Still, under pressure from the federal budget constraints, the councils are moving forward to narrow the scope of federal fisheries management.
Last fall, the Pacific fishery council agreed to remove 39 fish stocks from active federal management. And at its most recent meeting, it voted to remove another eight stocks. In Washington, this means once the cuts are finalized, popular species like Blue and Deacon rockfish will no longer be subject to federal catch limits or essential habitat protection.
Many of the Washington stocks in question will still be included in the council’s fisheries management plan, despite the new hands-off approach from the feds. That’s thanks to a compromise that continues oversight of six groundfish species found off the Washington coast: Blue rockfish, Deacon rockfish, Cabezon, China rockfish, Copper rockfish and Kelp greenling.
Those stocks have been designated as “ecosystem component species” that are still monitored, though they are not subject to federal regulations.
Heather Hall, the coastal region director with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, pushed for this continued oversight. Hall, who has represented Washington on the Pacific Fishery Management Council since 2020, said these six species are integral to Washington’s recreational fishery. Besides, she said, the fish don’t recognize human boundaries.
“If an angler goes out fishing for bottom fish, say, off our North Coast, they're going to catch a variety of these species,” Hall said.
That fisherman’s haul would most likely include species the council dropped from active federal management, not just fish the council kept on its list.
Of these two species - often caught together - only Black rockfish will have annual catch limits. Deacon rockfish is to be removed from active federal management and designated an ecosystem component species.
Hall hopes the ecosystem component species designation will prompt the Pacific Fishery Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service to keep considering how to manage these species moving forward. She said state managers sympathize with the constraints caused by the federal budget cuts. But there is still a lot to figure out.
“We didn't feel like, for Washington, we had a thorough discussion about who does what and the roles and responsibilities. And is the council gaining any efficiencies here by removing these or re-designating these species?“ Hall asked.
The state will continue its management and will “pick up the slack” when possible, Hall said. But there are still areas where work overlaps, such as stock assessments for which the states collect data.
“The stock assessments are what sets the [federal] catch limits,” she said.
As a result of the federal changes, the state department may need to ask the Washington Legislature for more staff to help cover new duties, Hall said. But the state’s conservation mission won’t change, and the process they use to set sustainable harvest levels with stakeholder input will continue.
In Oregon, where there is a more active commercial and recreational fishery for some groundfish, state officials opted to take over management for at least six of the species federal regulators will drop starting in 2030. Oregon wildlife officials want the stocks to remain in federal management. But barring that, taking on oversight will give them more control — and enough time to develop a state management plan.
Others argued stakeholders should be working to restore funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, rather than figuring out how to remove federal regulations.
“If it's a resource issue, let's have that conversation, right?” said Ben Enticknap, fisheries director at the ocean conservation advocacy organization Oceana.
Enticknap wants people to lobby Congress and make the case for fully funding the science and sustainable management that has helped rebuild stocks and prevent overfishing of these groundfish species and others. He noted that less than 30 years ago many West Coast groundfish stocks collapsed due to overfishing.
“There's like 70 rockfish species off the West Coast,” Enticknap said. “They're a really incredible group of fish, and they are very long-lived. Some rockfish species can be 100 years old. They're slow growing and late to mature, all these things that make them susceptible to overfishing.”
The species were rebuilt under the supervision of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, and Enticknap worries that without regulations like catch limits and protection of essential fish habitat, states might notice the decline of a species too late. The only backstop would be a weakened Endangered Species Act.
“We want a fully funded, robust fishery program for our nation, and that's the conversation we would like to be having,” he said.
Enticknap noted that the Pacific fishery council is the just the first of the eight fisheries councils in the U.S. to start carrying out these cuts. As NOAA Fisheries takes the reduced management on groundfish stocks through the rulemaking process, he hopes that fishermen, conservationists and other members of the public will push back. He said the nation has a responsibility to care for these resources.
“It is not easy, but we need to protect our oceans from overfishing. We need to protect habitats, and that's at risk when we start losing the science and going dark on the management,” Enticknap said.
Merrick Burden, the director of the Pacific fishery council, said the decisions about groundfish stocks are just the first of many to come.
“We have coastal pelagics, which are the sardines and anchovies and mackerels — the small, silvery things that everybody eats. We have the tunas and billfish, and we have salmon,” he said. “I expect us, to some degree, to consider this type of an action for each of those.”
Burden hopes the general public sees these management changes as the “real-life consequences” of cuts to federal budgets.
The council will monitor the consequences of the changes as best they can, Burden said. And he is confident that, for the stocks that remain on the council’s management plan — like Washington’s newly designated ecosystem component species — it would be relatively easy to fold them back into active management if there is a spike in catch levels or a noticeable drop in abundance. That’s a testament to the successful management built on the 50-year legacy of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
But for the species that they are dropping from the management plan, it’s a different story.
“If they're outside of our jurisdiction. I don't know what we do,” he said.
NOAA Fisheries is now working on rulemaking to codify the changes. It will take public comments once the new rules are published and before anything is ultimately decided.
