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

21. Department of Commerce · Major

Rewrite regulations implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and ESA

Partially done

676 21. Department of Commerce

“Modify Regulations Implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. These acts are currently being abused at a cost to fisheries and Native American subsistence activities around the U.S.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    NMFS opened the Marine Mammal Protection Act half, announcing "a comprehensive review of the import regulations" and soliciting input on revisions to the fish and fish-product import provisions — the comparability-finding regime the fishing industry treats as the Act's heaviest burden. A review, not a rule: as of the end of the window the MMPA regulations are unchanged, and the joint ESA interagency-cooperation and listing rules that bind NMFS are also still proposals.

  2. Partially done

    The first piece landed: FWS and NOAA jointly finalized the rescission of the ESA definition of "harm". A regulation implementing the Endangered Species Act was actually rewritten — the change most directly aimed at habitat-based restrictions on economic activity. A House bill (H.R. 9901, referred 2026-07-23) and a Senate CRA resolution (S.J.Res. 204, referred 2026-08-03) to void the rule were introduced but had gone nowhere by the end of the window.

  3. Attempted

    The Services proposed the wider rewrite: four joint or FWS proposed rules published together — the section 7 interagency-cooperation regulations, the listing and critical-habitat regulations, the critical-habitat designation regulations, and the blanket 4(d) rule extending endangered-species protections to threatened species. NOAA is a co-signer on the interagency-cooperation and listing rules, which are the ones that bind fisheries.

  4. Attempted

    Two directives on the same day. Executive Order 14276, Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness, ordered the Secretary of Commerce to "immediately consider suspending, revising, or rescinding regulations that overly burden America's commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries" and to seek ideas for fisheries management "within the requirements of" the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The same day NMFS and the Fish and Wildlife Service jointly proposed rescinding the ESA regulatory definition of "harm" — the definition that extends the take prohibition to habitat modification. Directives and a proposal; nothing changed yet.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • partial, not done: the Mandate asks for both Acts’ regulations. On the ESA side the “harm” definition is gone and two FWS-only rules are final, but the two joint FWS/NOAA proposals of 2025-11-21 (interagency cooperation; listing and critical habitat) had not been finalized by 2026-08-26, the Corpus cut-off. On the MMPA side nothing is final at all.
  • The FY2027 President’s Budget would move ESA and MMPA permitting out of NOAA entirely, “into a single program at DOI” — a structural change to who writes and applies these regulations, tracked under #1867 (break up and downsize NOAA) — https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget_fy2027.pdf
  • Not counted toward this ask: the fifty-odd routine MMPA incidental-take authorizations published in the window (Navy training, Alaska oil and gas, bridge projects). They apply the regulations rather than modify them.
  • No litigation over the 2026-07-14 rule was found in the CourtListener keyword file or the bulk docket snapshot (which ends 2026-06-30, before the rule issued); a challenge filed after that date would not be visible here.
Action
other
Object
regulations implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act
ID
1876