Businessman Howard Lutnick provided a seemingly straightforward answer when a Democratic senator asked him earlier this year whether he was considering moving NOAA Fisheries out of NOAA.
“No,” Lutnick said.
Strictly speaking, Lutnick’s written answer to a question posed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) still holds up. Since his confirmation as Commerce secretary, Lutnick has not proposed a wholesale relocation of NOAA Fisheries.
But as part of its new fiscal 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration revived a proposal to move to the Interior Department the NOAA Fisheries office that handles Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act issues.
The partial merger has been floated before, but it’s never gone very far. If the Trump administration is serious about pursuing the idea now, it will confront entrenched bureaucracies, congressional turf conflicts and a lot of very serious questions, former officials and advocacy organization leaders predict.
“It seems consolidating ESA functions would make sense to ensure consistent application of the law,” said Greg Sheehan, former FWS deputy director in the first Trump administration.
Still, Sheehan, now president and CEO of the Mule Deer Foundation, cautioned that a merger “may present some challenges if there is not open and ongoing dialogue between the agencies.”
Sheehan cited, for instance, a need for adequate “funding and staff and equipment,” and he predicted that “realigning relationships between stakeholders may prove more complex than the actual shifting of the program to FWS.”
Former FWS Director Dan Ashe noted that a partial merger “has been discussed often.”
Now the president and CEO of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Ashe added that the idea has into a “significant political barrier” as the two agencies “fall under different authorizing and appropriating committees in Congress.”
Neither the FWS nor NOAA responded to a request for comment.
Bureaucratic kin
The NOAA Fisheries budget in fiscal 2024 included about $265 million for “protected resources,” which includes enforcement of ESA and MMPA regulations.
The FWS’s budget for fiscal 2023 included about $296 million for “ecological services,” which covers various ESA-related actions.
NOAA Fisheries manages most marine mammals, most anadromous fish, turtles at sea, marine invertebrates such as corals and marine plants, including 165 species listed as threatened or endangered.
The FWS handles most other species, including more than 2,300 species worldwide listed as threatened or endangered.
The late Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young in 1995 introduced a bill directing an ESA-related merger.
“Having two agencies with overlapping responsibility is a waste of taxpayer funding and takes away resources that can be spent directly on species recovery,” Young said at the time.
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, the same idea was proposed and quickly dropped.
A bill drafted in 2023 took a different approach, with language in a larger NOAA-related measure calling upon the agency to contract with the National Academy of Public Administration for a study of the feasibility of transferring part or all of the ESA and MMPA duties to Interior.
The legislation never advanced.
“There’s this simple-minded idea that has been around for a while, through multiple administrations, about, ‘Why is this so complicated? Let’s put these two [agencies] together,’” said Andrew Rosenberg, deputy director of NOAA Fisheries during part of the Clinton administration.
But Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Carsey School for Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, added that “there’s a pretty clear delineation of responsibilities” that complicates any potential merger.
As regulators, the two agencies do not always move in lock step.
For instance, the FWS for several decades followed a “blanket rule” that automatically extended the strictest level of protection to threatened species unless special “4(d)” rules were written.
The first Trump administration ended the FWS’s “blanket rule” presumption that threatened and endangered species get the same level of protection. NOAA Fisheries, though, never imposed the same standard.
From the beginning
Congress created the modern FWS in 1956, including the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries to manage seals, sea lions, dolphins and porpoises.
In 1970, a reorganization plan pushed by then-President Richard Nixon and later approved by Congress established under the Commerce Department the new NOAA. That new agency got the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries.
That move, a NOAA history noted, may have been prompted in part by “some political tensions” between the Nixon White House and then-Interior Secretary Wally Hickel.
Three years later, in 1973, Congress passed the ESA, which divvied up ESA responsibilities between Interior’s FWS and NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, now known as NOAA Fisheries.
“I would say that whether you put Fish and Wildlife and NOAA into one agency or not, you’re not addressing a fundamental problem for all of these efforts, which is that they’re grossly understaffed and underfunded,” Rosenberg said.
Gib Brogan, senior campaign director at Oceana, said a partial merger would disrupt NOAA’s foundation of experience and expertise built up over the past half-century.
He warned, as well, about giving Interior more direct control over marine-related decisions that could overlap with the department’s other role in permitting offshore oil and gas projects.
“Our concern is by doing this in an expedited way, it removes the joint consultation process [between NOAA and the FWS] in a way that will put protected species at even more risk, and the professionals who have dedicated their careers to saving these species won’t be able to do their jobs as well,” Brogan said.
