Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Review expansion of the National Marine Sanctuaries System

Partially done

676 21. Department of Commerce

“NOS’ expansion of the National Marine Sanctuaries System should also be reviewed, as discussed below.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    NOAA announced in the Federal Register that it is reviewing, 'for consistency with the Administration's policies and Executive Orders', the final rule of 2025-01-16 designating the Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Sanctuary — the largest and newest expansion of the National Marine Sanctuaries System, whose designation had taken effect three weeks earlier on 2025-03-03. A review of the System's flagship expansion is a piece of the ask; no review of the System's expansion as a whole was announced, and the four sanctuary management-plan reviews opened since (Flower Garden Banks 2026-04-06, Olympic Coast 2026-05-12, Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank 2026-07-10) are the ordinary five-year cycle required by 16 U.S.C. 1434(e).

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The page’s trail is #1876 (Rewrite regulations implementing the MMPA and ESA, major, partial) and #1493; neither reaches the sanctuaries system, so this was searched from the instrument.

Negative search: a jq pass over every in-window Federal Register rule, proposed rule and notice whose title matches sanctuar (seven records, all listed in the chapter log); Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "National Marine Sanctuaries Act" and "sanctuary designation"; and presidential-actions.ndjson for sanctuary (0).

Boundary call, flagged to spot-checks.md. attempted would also be defensible — a notice that a rule is under review has changed nothing — but the Quote’s own verb is “reviewed”, so the review of the System’s largest expansion is delivery of part of the thing asked for. The alternative reading is recorded here.

EO 14276 sec. 4(h) (2025-04-17) ordered a review of all marine national monuments with a view to opening them to commercial fishing, and monuments were opened. Monuments are Antiquities Act designations, not National Marine Sanctuaries; under §3b that is an adjacent object and it is noted rather than counted.

Action
restrict
Object
National Marine Sanctuaries System expansion
ID
1873