George Leonard (GL): I am a marine scientist by training. I got a master's in marine science and then a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and have for 25 years worked on the interface between science and policy. I think many of the moves made by the Trump administration are counter to good public policy and put the ocean at great risk.
David Helvarg (DH): George, during the first Trump administration, his focus seemed to be on opening it up for offshore drilling.
GL: Yeah, I think that's right. Now, on the one hand, it (the Trump administration's new ocean policy) feels disjointed, unorganized, and without a broader strategy. And yet if you then actually try to focus in on what's happening, it seems to be quite deliberate. The attacks on science and knowledge seem to be comprehensive and unrelenting. And that's really troubling, right? It's troubling for a whole generation of upcoming scientists, undergraduates, graduate students, you know, postdocs, people who are just getting started and having the legs cut out from underneath them. And then you combine that with a real disdain for anything related to renewable energy. Obviously, the ocean has a huge role to play in renewable energy.
Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): I'm looking at the bill, and it's astounding that he is proposing a $2.2 billion reduction in NOAA's overall funding.
GL: By one account that I've seen there's 18 different line items, program areas that NOAA focuses on, and 11 of the 18 aren't just cut, they're terminated, like 100% reduction. The remaining (programs) experience a cut of between 20-60%. I mean, there's a lot of narrative around efficiency and (cutting) fraud and waste. But I have yet to see anything that supports these levels of cuts, certainly not in the NOAA space.
DH: And now they're doing major changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which has gotten America close to sustainable commercial fishing in federal waters. Fishermen can't be happy with that. Also, abolishing the Coastal Zone Management Act? That's every coastal state working in coordination with the feds to do good planning. What are some of the other really egregious things you saw coming out of this quote "Big Beautiful Bill"?
GL: I kept calling it the reconciliation bill because I refuse to call it the "big beautiful bill." Some I've heard call it the "big ugly bill." But look, the first thing that I think is really troubling is (getting rid of) the Ocean Observatories Initiative, right? That's a bunch of basic research and scientists working on a whole range of ocean-related science. Climate obviously is a big part of that, but also understanding the role of habitats and the importance of biodiversity and fisheries. That's entirely slated to be cut. I don't know how you pursue any kind of science-based work if you're going to reduce that to zero.
DH: That includes 10 laboratories working on climate and weather.
GL: That's right: 10 individual facilities that are to be closed. But the other big science-related piece for NOAA that many folks probably don't know they have is a big ocean observing system where there are literally high-tech buoys and devices deployed both in coastal waters and in offshore waters. They take the temperature, the pulse if you will, of the ocean and by my latest look, this is also slated for termination.
DH: And one of those ocean observing impacts is that it warns people when there are harmful algal blooms, when red tides are coming into Florida for example, when the beaches are going to be shut down. That warning system is gone. The public's being told, "Go swim at your own risk."
VNG: Or eat shellfish without knowing…
GL: Yes, harmful algal blooms can make water unfit to swim in. But they also have big impacts on the shellfish that we eat. And I know shellfish poisoning is nothing to laugh at. It can be extremely dangerous.
DH: I once interviewed a fisheries enforcement agent who demonstrated the effects of paralytic shellfish poisoning. He grabbed his throat and swelled up his tongue in his mouth and started gagging and flopping around on his desk very realistically. That guy's probably been laid off under this plan.
GL: Probably. You know there are other specific aspects of NOAA that are likewise being hobbled here. One is their ocean acidification program. You know burning fossil fuels is doing two things to the ocean. It's making the ocean hotter, and it's making the ocean more acidic. About 90% of the heat generated by climate change from burning fossil fuels ends up in the ocean and along with warming, it's also making the ocean more acidic. And that's simply because CO2 dissolves in water, and NOAA has spearheaded that work and done a lot of work with coastal shellfish farmers and others to address this issue, and that work (with the aquaculture industry) is being cut as well.
VNG: You think about acidification, what's so important is that you need those calcium carbonate ions, and with acidification, they're being reduced. And so, when you think about oysters and muscles and crabs and clams needing that material as basic building blocks, we're looking at enormous hits to the ocean's productivity.
DH: And people's livelihoods. The shellfish industry has become the indicator species for ocean acidification.
GL: And some of the biggest champions to address the broader issue of climate change and how it relates to ocean acidification have been shellfish farmers, particularly shellfish farmers on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
DH: Now Trump's pushing deep-sea mining, and yet they've terminated NOAA's Ocean Exploration and Research division, which is all about exploring the deep ocean and understanding the places where they want to go and exploit it.
GL: There's all kinds of things like that that don't make sense. There was an executive order (from Trump) a while back about promoting U.S. aquaculture, and yet there's a cut to the (NOAA) aquaculture program in the reconciliation bill. So, what is that? Do we want to support aquaculture or do we want to undermine it? There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there.
VNG: It just seems so challenging to follow the logic with this budget.
DH: It's almost vindictive, without logic, taking a chainsaw to places that may need scalpels or may in fact need to be expanded. Most people hearing about the bill are only hearing about it in terms of, "It'll add $3 or $4 trillion to the budget deficit" or "It will take Medicaid away from 12 million people and give tax benefits to the rich." But there's much more there. Like it will also impact our public seas in these many different ways that we're talking about. The Ocean used to be a bipartisan issue.
GL: Yeah, and there've been great examples of bipartisan work in the U.S. on oceans and fisheries and other issues. But when you look at the voting on this bill, it's pretty astounding. I mean, it's hard to ignore the fact that all the Democrats voted against it, and pretty much all the Republicans with a handful of exceptions, voted for it (passing it into law).
VNG: Well, I think we really need to engage with people who care about these issues. When people start linking up national, federal decisions with their own livelihoods, I think that's when people will start realizing, "Hmm, maybe there's an opportunity in the next election cycle to change what's happening."
GL: And of course, the great irony here is that NOAA had an Office of Education, which also is fully terminated. So whatever education and outreach and conversation is going to happen (around the ocean), it doesn't look like it's going to be led by NOAA, at least in the short term.
DH: No, and look at what we're seeing in other frontline agencies. I mean, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump, they're pushing to shift the market away from a clean energy transition and back to fossil fuels. They are promoting keeping coal-fired power plants open, which is a major source of mercury in tuna. Mercury out of the smoke stacks that precipitates onto the ocean and into the food web. It's crazy. We're literally at a point where market forces favor a transition to cleaner, cheaper energy, including offshore wind, and they're trying to use their political power to shift that balance back to offshore oil and the burning of coal while denying climate science.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse?
I mean democracies don't guarantee environmental improvement, but that never happens under dictatorships. You need to have democracy in order to have good environmental policy. And so, there's this larger issue: Are we moving away from democracy and is that why we're seeing these irrational power- and vengeance-driven attacks on our public seas?
GL: That's the $64,000 question, David. I don't have a great answer for that one. I'm really just a lowly marine scientist by training, but I do think those are important questions for us to ask and it certainly seems like the evidence, at least now, is pointing in that direction. You know, you were talking about renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Maybe we should acknowledge one very small win in the legislative process here. There was part of the bill that was going to put additional taxes on offshore wind and other renewable technologies that was stripped out of the final version of the bill. And what remains is the tax incentives that are the remainder of the Inflation reduction Act from the Biden administration that will not expire until 2027.
It's a minor win, but one I think that was hard fought for and all of these minor improvements that made the big bad bill less bad is because of advocates and public leaders in Congress and folks like yourselves who are bringing these issues to everybody's attention.
VNG: I want to go back to our national marine sanctuaries program, something that's vital for protecting critical habitats and species and yet they're cutting this program by 60%. And that also includes our national monuments (in the ocean). And you are living adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, so how do you feel these impacts are going to affect recovery?
GL: It's super disheartening. It's the underwater equivalent of our national park system, right? America's greatest idea, but underwater. You know, I grew up in Massachusetts and I remember seeing little sea urchins and teeny little plants and a couple of small fish, and I just thought this was the coolest thing. Then I came to California and flopped into a kelp forest out here, and it just blew my mind away. And I was spellbound, right? And, I realized pretty quickly that that kelp forest was just an example of what was in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was a testament to just the incredible biodiversity and the amazing habitats that we have here.
So, it's really tough to think about what might be the future of that with a sanctuary office that's going to lose its superintendent and employees and people that I went to graduate school with who have made this their life, protecting the coastal ocean here. I've heard, you know, that they're only going to maintain the buoys in the sanctuaries through this bill and cease all on-water operations, which I'm still not sure what that means. I assume that means any kind of research, and they've also made a statement that they're no longer going to consider any new sanctuaries.
Now the National Marine Sanctuaries Act (the law) has a whole process by which new sanctuaries can be nominated and debated. And they're going to shut the door on any future sanctuaries? I think that's a real disservice to the legislation and to the public's ability to identify places that they want to see protected.
DH: So, George, in terms of looking at what the administration is doing with this new bill, what are the two or three ocean impacts that you think the marine conservation community should be focusing on and educating the public around?
GL: If we kind of step way back for a second, why is this a problem for the ocean? It's important to recognize what are the three big threats right now to ocean health.
In very simplistic terms, what's happening is that we're putting too much stuff into the ocean and we're taking too much stuff out of the ocean. So, we're putting in too much carbon, we're putting in too much plastic, we're putting in too many other pollutants, and we're basically taking out too many fish because there is still a global overfishing crisis.
And so, the United Nations has framed this up as sort of a triple planetary crisis where we have climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss as three separate but connected problems. And they need to be individually addressed, but they also need to be addressed in an integrative way because the ocean is one big connected system.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse? And I think it's not hard to make the argument that for all three of those problems, this bill makes them worse.
DH: And I'd just add that if you love the ocean, you have to love democracy too. And you have to fight like hell to turn the tide here.
GL: Absolutely. This is not a time to give up. I just saw a headline this morning that some of the Republicans have already started to push back a bit on some of the NOAA impacts largely because of advocacy from members of the public. So, you know, while the bill passed and was signed on July 4, we are still, I think, in the early days of what this is actually going to mean on the water. And we need to keep focused on that.
VNG: Looking for more opportunities for the public to get our voices out there and to make sure that we go out and vote and keep the ocean as a priority.
A graphic shows the status of nine environmental categories, four of which have been broken down into two control variables. Image from Planetary Health Check 2024. Design by Globaïa. 
