This report is only a summary and editorial regarding the executive orders (“EOs”) signed by the Trump Administration during the last week. EOs are not legislation or court opinions. They do not carry the weight of law, and are merely statements of policy within the executive branch. That is not to say they cannot be cited in court or legal pleadings, or aren’t relevant to the application of law, only that they are almost never controlling outside of internal executive branch administration.
EOs are signed and reported on, generally, a week before they are published into the Federal Register. Until such a publication, it can be difficult to know the exact language of the signed EO. For that reason, these reports only include EOs published in the Federal Register. While this can lead to these reports feeling delayed or dated, it is to ensure precision and clarity.
While I am a licensed attorney, this is not paid legal advice. Nothing in this communication is intended to create an attorney-client relationship. Unless expressly stated otherwise, nothing contained in this article should be construed as a digital or electronic signature, nor is it intended to reflect an intention to make an agreement by electronic means.
Section 1 talks about how the US has the greatest seafood in the world. It makes a wild claim that overregulation harms the seafood industry and that fish stocks are in healthy supply.
Section 2 Talks about how successful his 2020 EO 13921 helped fishermen, but in the last 4 years regulations have harmed them.
Section 3 states it is the policy of the US to promote the fishing industry.
Section 4 orders various Secretaries to review and determine which regulations should be repealed to assist the fishing industry. It also requires them to identify which protected fisheries need to be deregulated and allow harvesting again.
This EO is very much in line with the deregulation of the timber and coal industries, and the making available of federal lands for exploitation by those industries.
Global fisheries are generally considered overfished, and this EO will only contribute to that problem. Not only will the fish from these fisheries directly decline, other fisheries will suffer due to the migratory nature of many species. The seafood industry in America may enjoy some small boost from this in the short term, but long term the depletion of these fisheries will not take long, and we will return to the high level of imported seafood we are currently at.