Letter to Donald Trump, President of the United States - In New Letter, Chair Grijalva and Rep. Huffman Highlight President Trump's Failure to Distribute Congressionally Approved Funding for Hard-Hit Fishermen

Letter

Dear President Trump:

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the seafood industry particularly hard, interrupting supply chains
and leaving fishermen with limited markets to sell their fresh, sustainable, and healthy seafood
products. To address this impact, Congress appropriated $300 million in the CARES Act to
provide immediate relief to Tribal, subsistence, commercial, and charter fishery participants.
Unfortunately, the Department of Commerce took nearly six weeks to determine how to allocate
the funds. And as of today -- three months later -- not a single fisherman has received one cent.

While your administration has been unable to distribute the much-needed aid to fishermen that
Congress provided, it still had time to craft the May 7 Executive Order on "Promoting American
Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth," that aims to gut our science-based, sustainable
fishery management system. It is reprehensible that you and your administration are intentionally
ignoring the real problem: fishermen cannot sell their fish. Rather than developing market
solutions or providing Congressionally-mandated economic relief, you replace the current crisis
with a manufactured one of excessive regulation, tasking Regional Fishery Management Councils
with developing a list of deregulatory actions at a time when the full force of their expertise should
be used to find sustainable management solutions that can help fishing businesses. Your Executive
Order does nothing to help the industry in the immediate-term and will have long-term negative
consequences for both fish and the fishing industry.

The United States has some of the most well-managed and successful fisheries in the world, thanks
to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. American fishermen landed
$5.6 billion worth of seafood in 2018, and the U.S. is already one of the largest seafood producers
in the developed world. Yet, your Executive Order invites the fishery management councils and
the industry to identify unnamed regulations and obstacles to seafood production that, until the
pandemic, was already contributing billions to the U.S. economy. The regulations and
requirements you claim are burdens on the industry are the very reasons that our fisheries have
been rebuilt and are so successful today. Lack of adequate regulation in the past led to disasters in
New England--dark days with plummeting fish stocks that we should not seek to relive.

Instead, we should look to the successes of the Magnuson-Stevens Act at a time when the nation
has rebuilt 47 stocks, including the rebuilding of the West coast groundfish fishery. Thanks to the
Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Fishery Management Council process, overfishing has ended for
many economically valuable fisheries and put overfished stocks on a path to rebuilding -- putting
money in American fishermen's pockets. Sustainable fisheries management leads to healthy,
resilient oceans and economic opportunity for American fishermen. Your Executive Order
threatens this progress and causes Fishery Management Councils to waste precious time and
resources. Your quest to deregulate the fishing industry--much like you have done for the oil and
gas industry--will hurt the fishing communities who depend on healthy stocks in the long run.

The fishing industry is not lacking fish, nor is it overregulated, and until your trade embargos and
the pandemic, it was not lacking markets. Deregulation will not fix these problems and will only
hurt fishing communities if we revert to recklessly harvesting resources at an unsustainable rate.

Sincerely,

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