U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick vowed to protect and support Maine lobster during a hearing on his department’s budget plans, while suggesting that Maine lobster processed in Canada would likely be unaffected by new tariffs.
“This administration views the Maine lobster industry as an American treasure, and we need to protect it,” Lutnick told lawmakers during a 4 June budget hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Lutnick’s comments on the Maine lobster fishery came following questioning by U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who was looking for clarity on how federal regulators would interpret U.S. President Donald Trump’s new executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” According to the White House, the order requires “that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately.”
“Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly. A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis,” Trump said in the order. “Unfortunately, the Federal Government has contributed to this loss of trust. In several notable cases, executive departments and agencies (agencies) have used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.”
The executive order specifically cites a 2021 biological opinion regarding North Atlantic right whales, which used a worse-case scenario for projecting the population of the endangered marine mammals. That biological opinion led NOAA Fisheries to impose stringent regulations on the Maine lobster fishery in order to protect the whales, even as some in the agency questioned the accuracy of those projections.
“In 2022, the Biden administration proposed regulations that posed a threat to the very existence of the lobster fishery,” Collins said during the 4 June hearing. “If implemented, it would have shut down the lobster industry. The Maine delegation worked as a team, and we were able to successfully block those regulations and prevent them from going into effect for a period of years.”
NOAA Fisheries was sued over the regulations, and in 2023, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered NOAA Fisheries to vacate the biological opinion, arguing that the agency had gone too far.
“What the court found was that the service acted in an arbitrary and capricious way and blocked the regulations from going forward,” Collins said. “But obviously it's costly to go to court and to do that.”
Following up, Collins asked Lutnick how Trump’s executive order would protect commercial fisheries …
