NOAA cuts could harm Southwest Florida fishing economy, threaten red tide research

Yahoo

17-05-2025

Sweeping cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could imperil Florida's multibillion-dollar fishing industry and coastal economy, industry leaders and scientists warn — a dire prospect for a region built on tourism, seafood and the health of its waters.
Beyond running the national weather monitoring and alert systems — its most visible role — NOAA also works to prevent overfishing, monitor the coastal environment and support local ocean research.
For Florida's Gulf Coast, that means researching red tide, addressing habitat loss and restoring overfished species. Since 2020 alone, NOAA has supported these efforts with more than $35 million in grants and contracts for Suncoast governments and nonprofits, including Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota.
But after U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January, more than 2,000 employees have left NOAA as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency makes its way through the agency, sources with knowledge of the matter told Suncoast Searchlight.
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Steep funding cuts soon could follow. The White House this month recommended slashing NOAA's budget by more than $1.5 billion, with a special focus on 'climate-dominated research, data and grant programs.'
And a leaked memo outlines a host of goals to further reduce the agency's work: It seeks to halve the budget for NOAA's National Ocean Service line office, which oversees coastal conservation; close its Oceanic and Atmospheric Research line office, which conducts research on climate, oceans, the Great Lakes and weather systems; and strip 30% of the budget for its National Marine Fisheries Service.
The memo also recommends Congress terminate funding for grants focused on species recovery, habitat conservation and restoration — potentially causing ripple effects for local governments and the nonprofit sector in the Suncoast.
In an email, a spokesperson for NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service wrote that the agency 'remains dedicated to its mission' and declined to comment on personnel and management-related concerns.
'What makes Florida special?' said Scott Hickman, a Galveston, Texas-based charter captain and the founder of the Charter Fisherman's Association.
'Do you think people want to go to Florida and spend millions of dollars on condos and houses and boats and because they want dirty water, and ugly beaches, and no fish in the water, and no live corals, and no sea grass beds?' Hickman told Suncoast Searchight. 'That's why people go to Florida, right? For the wild beauty.'
Established under the U.S. Department of Commerce by President Richard Nixon in 1970, NOAA was tasked from its inception with managing the country's fisheries to ensure a sustained seafood supply.
Over time, Congress expanded its mission — charging the agency with protecting endangered marine species, extending its reach 200 miles offshore and setting up regional councils to work with NOAA to cap catches based on scientific research.
Building on that foundation, the agency has worked to replenish depleted fish populations, rebuilding at least 50 overfished stocks and rolling out recovery plans for species like red snapper.
Last year, NOAA reported the number of overfished stocks had dropped to historic lows. At the same time, the popular game fish cubera snapper was officially removed from the overfished list in the Gulf of Mexico, recognized federally as Gulf of America by Trump's executive order.
In Florida, where commercial and recreational fishing supported $24.6 billion in economic activity in 2022 alone — a figure that includes fishermen's sales as well as related retail, restaurant and supply chain impacts — the stakes are high.
'By collecting data and making sound management decisions, we have made huge headway toward ending overfishing,' said Janet Coit, who served as director of the National Marine Fisheries Service from 2021 until January 2025, in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight. 'The biggest tragedy here would be if we hollow out or undercut the system upon which these sustainably managed fisheries rest.'
Leaders in the Gulf Coast fishing industry told Suncoast Searchlight their businesses depend on NOAA's research.
'Fishermen are very reliant on NOAA for a lot of things,' said Eric Brazer, the deputy director of Gulf of America Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance, a commercial fishing trade group. 'They provide some necessary structure and some necessary regulations that strike that balance between having a profitable fishing business and leaving enough fish in the ocean for the future.'
Without complete data, the management councils established by the federal government to regulate fisheries may set more conservative quotas, cutting into fishers' bottom line.
'Bad data, or no data, or gaps in the data,' Brazer said, 'means disruption for commercial fishermen down the road.'
Like any regulated industry, fishing is rife with tension between profit-driven operators and the agencies that oversee them. In recent years, that friction has also centered on data. While commercial fishers must report their hauls down to the pound, NOAA surveys fishers to estimate recreational catches — a method that drew criticism after a 2023 internal review suggested the agency may have overcounted. NOAA has since pledged improvements, but mistrust persists.
'People worry about them not being able to get the proper data and stuff like that,' said Dustin Lambert, a Sarasota charter captain. 'Nobody knows where the f— these numbers are coming from.'
Dramatic reductions in staff at the science centers that produce NOAA's research could 'further the divide' between fishers and federal regulators, said Jim Green, a third-generation fisherman and president of the Destin Charter Boat Association who last year was appointed to NOAA's Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee as an advocate for for-hire fishers.
Green was interested in improving data collection for charter fishing operators.
But the committee's work was abruptly terminated when, on Feb. 28 – just a month after Trump's inauguration – the new administration disbanded it.
'To put us in a further place of peril while we're trying to figure that out,' Green said, 'I think that it could have been thought out a little better.
NOAA's role in protecting marine life extends beyond tracking fish populations. The agency also monitors environmental threats like rising ocean temperatures and algal blooms – phenomena that directly impact the fishing and tourism industries.
When a particularly severe outbreak of red tide hit the coastal waters of Southwest Florida in 2018, more than 2,400 tons of dead marine life washed ashore, according to a 2020 report produced by the Science & Environment Council.
The algal bloom killed one in 12 manatees on the state's west coast. Asthma cases jumped in Sarasota and Pinellas counties by as much as 16%. And the region's tourism industry lost an estimated $1.27 billion dollars.
The toll on the fishing industry was profound: Commercial fish catches reported to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission dropped by 11% across the Sarasota and Tampa Bay areas from 2017, with Manatee County fishers reporting a 25% drop.
NOAA researchers have sought to understand and mitigate those impacts.
In 2022, scientists with the agency's Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the University of Miami linked the proliferation of red tide with suppressed oxygen levels in the ocean which produce 'dead zones' that trigger the migration and mass death of marine species.
To track algal blooms, including red tide, NOAA maintains a monitoring system using satellite imagery.
Ana Vaz, a fish biologist terminated amid mass civil service firing in March, was involved in early planning at NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami on a project to predict red tide risks using probabilistic modeling and machine learning — a tool she believes could be feasible.
'This has a lot of implications for our Florida coastal community,' Vaz said. 'It's something we were starting to work towards, because (red tide) is very difficult to predict.'
The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, which houses the agency's red tide satellite monitoring program, could be on the chopping block, too: In the leaked memo, the White House proposed eliminating that office entirely.
That worries business owners like Karen Bell of AP Bell and Star Fish Company in Cortez.
'I know there's a lot of waste in government, I've seen it, but to go in there just machete-like, or what was the one guy waving around, a chainsaw? That's not how you do it,' Bell said. 'Who does things like that without a process, without a review, and consideration of who are you impacting and how are you impacting them? Because it's people's lives. And I just don't mean the government side, the employees; I mean the fishermen too.'
That ripple effect Bell described — where federal decisions are felt beyond D.C. — is especially true along Florida's coast, where NOAA dollars fuel local efforts to protect coastal communities and the environment.
The agency has directed more than $35 million in grants and contracts to governments, nonprofits, and private companies in Sarasota and Manatee counties since 2020. The funds have supported a wide range of projects, from shoreline restoration and coral reef rehabilitation to aquaculture research and red tide tracking.
In 2023, Sarasota County received $15 million to restore shoreline and floodplain habitat — work aimed at reducing flood risks and mitigating the effects of sea level rise. A year later, Manatee County secured $5 million for similar efforts. Both projects fall under NOAA's broader goal of helping coastal communities adapt to a changing climate.
Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, headquartered in Sarasota, has been the region's largest recent recipient of NOAA support, receiving nearly $13 million in the past six years to fund a variety of initiatives, including breeding climate-resilient coral, tracking harmful algal blooms and developing new tools to detect marine mammal strandings.
On its website, the organization notes that Florida's Coral Reef is 'struggling to survive amid growing environmental pressures,' with just 2% of the state's coral cover alive today. By breeding native reef species that have demonstrated resilience to adverse conditions, Mote scientists are working to restore them.
Mote did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. But the lab's NOAA-funded work has positioned it as a central player in Florida's marine science landscape, particularly as red tide blooms and coral loss intensify in the Gulf.
Other local entities also have benefited. The Gulf Shellfish Institute, based in Manatee County, received $2.5 million for research into sustainable shellfish aquaculture. Nearby, Two Docks Shellfish LLC was awarded more than $260,000 to support efforts to improve shellfish restoration and water quality in local bays.
Even in inland DeSoto County, NOAA procured a contract in 2018 worth more than $30,000 for equipment repairs by a local company that produces life rafts. While small by comparison, the investment reflects the wide-ranging economic impacts of NOAA's work.
Drafted by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the White House plan to cut funding for NOAA reflects sections of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy wishlist developed by OMB director Russell Vought. The nearly 900-page missive refers to NOAA as a 'colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry' and calls for the agency to be 'broken up and downsized.'
During a May trip to D.C., Brazer and a national coalition of fishers sought to impart a very different message about NOAA to congressional aides and agency staff, stressing the importance of the agency's researchers in maintaining healthy fisheries.
In a press release issued just weeks earlier, Brazer's organization had praised Trump's executive order calling for improved data collection on the fishing industry and combatting illegal and unreported fishing in federal waters. Those goals seemed at odds with the administration's plan to defund NOAA.
'We were there talking about maintaining the council system and the permitting process, data collection programs, monitoring programs, weather and forecasting [which are] absolutely critical to running a business on the ocean,' said Brazer. 'In order to implement the President's vision, we need to maintain core services for NOAA.'
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.