Endangered right whales off the Atlantic coast are at the center of a new dispute over how quickly the federal government should tighten rules intended to reduce deaths and injuries from human activity, including fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes.
The Trump administration said it strongly supports a proposal to delay new federal right whale protections until 2035, according to a memo released Friday. The memo said Trump’s senior advisors would recommend he sign the measure into law if it passes Congress. The administration’s backing comes after the government already paused any new federal rules about right whales until 2028.
The controversy centers on the North Atlantic right whale, a population that researchers have estimated at about 380 animals. Environmental groups say reducing injuries and deaths caused by people is essential to the species’ recovery, while the Trump-backed approach seeks to create more time for regulators to rethink how they assess threats and craft rules.
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine, is pushing the 2035 delay, arguing it would give regulators time to craft protections “that are less burdensome to the fishing industry.” Golden said Maine’s lobster industry would have been “crushed” by the now-paused regulations, which he said were “based on flawed science and hypothetical scenarios rather than the reality on the water.”
Golden also said a longer delay would allow the government time to “get the science right” about threats to whales. The proposal comes as right whales already are legally protected under federal law and as officials have paused new federal actions on the species through 2028.
Supporters from the fishing industry argue that prolonged regulatory uncertainty harms the long-term outlook for their operations. John Drouin, vice president of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said, “This legislation is critical to ensuring the long-term stability of American fisheries for generations to come.”
Environmental groups have pushed back against efforts to weaken whale protections. They point to how the right whale population fell by about a quarter from 2010 to 2020 and say recovery has been slow in recent years.
Despite the criticism, some recent reproductive signs have raised hopes among conservation advocates. The New England Aquarium said this year’s birthing season produced 23 mother-calf pairs, the most since 2009, and said the whale remains critically endangered even as the species gives birth off Florida and Georgia before migrating north to feed off New England and Canada.
The aquarium said right whales have been protected for more than 50 years, but the population was decimated during the era of commercial whaling and has struggled to rebound. It also cited cases where scientists said right whales have strayed from protected ocean zones in recent years as waters warm, increasing the risk of encounters with ships and fishing operations.