21. Department of Commerce · Notable
Exempt fisheries actions from NEPA
Printed page 676 21. Department of Commerce
“Allow a NEPA Exemption for Fisheries Actions. … NEPA overlays these requirements with onerous, redundant, and time-consuming process requirements, which routinely cause unnecessary delays in the promulgation of timely fisheries management actions. The Department of Commerce and the Council on Environmental Quality should collaborate to reduce this redundancy.”
What has happened
- Attempted
Commerce updated Departmental Administrative Order 216-6, its NEPA implementing order, and NOAA proposed new categorical exclusions in the same Federal Register document — including 'A1: A fishery management action' and 'A3: Temporary fishery closures or extensions of closures under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act'. That is the Department and CEQ route the Quote asks for and it covers fisheries actions specifically, but the exclusions were only proposed: no final notice adopting them had published by 2026-08-31, so no fisheries action is yet exempt.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
The operative text was read at
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-07-01/html/2025-12272.htm; the proposed categorical
exclusions A1 and A3 are at lines 273 and 284 of the extracted text.
Sequence check: the only follow-on in the record is a correction (FR 2025-14110, 2025-07-28). A
Federal Register search restricted to the Commerce Department slug for "categorical exclusions" since
2025-07-01 returns six documents, four of them ESA rules; no final CE notice. Hence attempted rather
than partial.
The upstream instrument is the same one Chapter 2’s #86 turns on — CEQ’s removal of its own NEPA regulations (FR 2025-03014, 2026-00178), which is what freed agencies to write their own procedures. Commerce used that freedom here.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- NEPA review requirements for fisheries actions
- ID
- 1877