Trump To Allow Commercial Fishing In New England Marine Monument

May 9 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday will sign a proclamation restoring commercial fishing access to a marine national monument off New England, according to a White House official.

The move is aligned with the Trump administration’s efforts to cut regulations it believes are burdensome to businesses and economic activity.

The proclamation will reopen the nearly 5,000-square-mile (13,000-square-kilometer) Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which was designated by former President Barack Obama in 2016 to protect species including deep-sea corals, sea turtles and whales.

Trump opened the monument to fishing during his first term in 2020, but that was reversed by former President Joe Biden in 2021.

The decision supports fishing communities, economic activity and jobs, the White House official said.

A recent aerial survey of the monument by the New England Aquarium, supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, found over 600 animals, including a humpback whale calf and bottlenose dolphin calves, the group posted on Facebook on Friday.

Peter Auster, research professor emeritus of marine sciences at the University of Connecticut, said the monument serves as an important reference site for understanding how human activity in the ocean affects marine life. 

“Without protected areas like this that exclude commercial scale activities, we have no measure of how human uses elsewhere at sea impact biodiversity,” Auster said.

The monument is the second Trump has opened to fishing since his second term started in January. On April 17 he signed an order opening 400,000 acres of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

The administration’s regulatory freeze injected chaos and uncertainty into the nation’s $320 billion fishing industry this spring, when it delayed the opening of some East Coast fisheries and led to overfishing of Atlantic bluefin tuna, Reuters has previously found.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom, Jeff Mason and Leah Douglas; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Deepa Babington)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2025.

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