A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is not measuring up to bycatch-monitoring standards.
In its 60-page report, GAO outlined a number of ways in which NFMS has failed to adequately tackle bycatch issues and harm to marine mammals and other species. According to the report, a central failing from the NMFS was a lack of observer coverage of fisheries.
“NMFS’s efforts to track its performance in reducing and monitoring bycatch do not align with key elements of evidence-based policymaking related to performance management,” the report stated. “Specifically, the agency’s bycatch-reduction implementation plan lacks measurable performance goals.”
According to the GAO, the NMFS and regional fishery management council officials have not gathered enough information from various U.S. fishing regions on what resources they need to support fishery observer programs and have also not communicated any information on what is required to external stakeholders such as Congress.
“By doing so, NMFS could ensure that stakeholders are more informed when making resource decisions,” GAO said.
The GAO also said that NMFS has taken steps to enhance its database to compile bycatch estimates but that it does not have any comprehensive plan on how to actually report those estimates.
“Developing such a plan could help the agency better monitor bycatch levels, trends, and information gaps, and demonstrate progress over time to internal and external stakeholders,” GAO said.
GAO pointed out that a key method of gathering bycatch data is fishery observers and that the NMFS itself has found fishery observers are essential to bycatch reduction due to a number of different factors – including how bycatch-reduction measures are highly fishery-specific due to a range of biological and technical factors.
Despite that, observer coverage can be incredibly different from fishery to fishery.
“We found that the level of observer coverage can vary widely across fisheries, and the recruitment and retention of observers is an ongoing challenge,” GAO said. “NMFS officials and council representatives told us that various factors influence the observer coverage rate for a given fishery, including the availability of funding, any protected species concerns, and the size and geographic range of a fishery’s fleet. Additionally, NMFS officials told us that noncompetitive compensation and difficult working conditions hamper the recruitment and retention of observers.”
While the NMFS said it is difficult to recruit fishery observers, GAO said that in its investigation it found the NMFS did not do enough to actually describe why limited observer coverage was such a limiting factor on bycatch estimation or what additional resources it needs to address the challenges it says it has.
“For example, in its recent budget justifications to Congress, there is some discussion of observers and resources, but no discussion of specific resource needs, resulting in stakeholders lacking a complete picture of the agency’s resource needs,” GAO said. “NMFS officials said that, while some regions have outlined their resource needs for observers, the agency has not gathered this information from all regions or communicated these resource needs externally.”
GAO made four different recommendations on actions the NMFS can take: It should gather more information across the regional fishing management areas to determine what resources are needed to support fisheries observers and communicate those needs to Congress; should develop an updated National Bycatch Reduction Strategy Implementation Plan with measurable performance goals; should create a process for tracking progress toward those goals and use the information to guide decision making; and should develop a comprehensive written plan to determine how it will report bycatch estimates and trends.
“By developing a comprehensive written plan for reporting on bycatch estimates, NMFS will be better able to communicate bycatch levels, trends, and information gaps to internal and external stakeholders,” GAO said.
The new report and its focus on observer coverage came just as the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case that overturned the longstanding Chevron deference, hampering NOAA and NFMS’s regulatory authority, in a case which place observer coverage at its core.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision on Chevron stemmed from Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which involved fishermen who sued over a new NFMS requirement that forced them to pay for at-sea monitors to observe their fishing operations.
The fishermen argued that the cost was untenable and that it was financially crippling their business to carry observers – which they claimed could cost them up to USD 700 (EUR 640) per day.
The court ultimately sided with fishermen and found courts should no longer defer to regulatory agencies like NMFS when making decisions on lawsuits related to regulations, placing more power in the hands of the courts on technical statutory questions.
“Federal officials usually ignore the well-grounded concerns American fishermen share about overregulation,” New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association CEO Jerry Leeman said of the decision. “We are grateful to the Supreme Court for bucking this trend. And, we are especially grateful to the fishermen-plaintiffs in Relentless and Loper Bright who have spent years fighting for their brother and sister fishermen everywhere.”
That decision on 28 June came just before the GAO released its findings, which could make its push for observer coverage more complicated. A response from the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA and the NMFS, acknowledge that the cost of observer coverage will continue to be the most complicated aspect of tackling bycatch monitoring.
“Bycatch monitoring is among the most expensive endeavors the agency undertakes, and this report highlights how the limited funding for bycatch reduction and monitoring impacts NMFS’s ability to collect and analyze bycatch data, and how these funding constraints ultimately affect NMFS’ ability to more accurately estimate and report on bycatch impacts in federal fisheries,” the Commerce Department's response said.
