If you truly want to understand what Donald Trump has done to our public seas during his presidency, you might want to start with “Trump on the Ocean.”
The Trump Administration continues to use administrative actions, executive orders, and lax enforcement to undermine key U.S. laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.
This is not the policy paper it sounds like. Rather, it’s a $24 million upscale catering hall and restaurant he proposed building at New York’s Jones Beach State Park in 2006, at one point suing the state, unsuccessfully, over approval delays. The idea was abandoned after Hurricane Sandy blasted the area in 2012, turning the construction site into a saltwater sinkhole.
As a developer, Trump has appreciated the ocean as a backdrop for his hotels, golf courses, resorts, and casinos from Palos Verdes, California, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, Panama to Scotland, and of course, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. There, according to sources close to the situation, he stiffed an environmental consultant out of tens of thousands of dollars after being given a report stating it would be illegal for him to dump sand or gravel on top of three small coral reefs just offshore.
Trump has also had problems with wind turbines off his Scottish golf resort; his company had to pay $290,000 in legal fees to the government of Scotland, which he had sued. He was met with community resistance in Palos Verdes (where he sued the local school district). And his sail-shaped “Ocean Club” hotel in Panama was allegedly used by drug cartels and Russian organized crime to launder money.
While being on record as not liking boats or water sports (and being terrified of sharks, who he hoped would all die, according to Stormy Daniels), Trump in 1988 nonetheless bought a 282-foot yacht for $29 million from the Sultan of Brunei and refurbished it as the Trump Princess for almost $10 million. Three years later, as his Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he sold it to a Saudi prince for $19 million, for a quick loss of almost $20 million.
It’s hard to say if Trump resents the ocean (it has bigger name recognition) but he clearly does not regard it with any wonder or respect. Since becoming President, he has revoked President Obama’s National Ocean Policy, attempted to open up 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, given companies permission to harass or kill whales while surveying for oil and gas, and pursued changes in environmental laws that threaten coastal waters and seafood.
Trump, it’s true, has also signed two bipartisan bills into law that are considered ocean friendly: a plastic pollution bill in October 2018 and the Great American Outdoors Act in August 2020. But both come with caveats.
The plastics bill, reauthorizing an existing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program on marine debris, was used by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator and former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to deflect from climate issues at a global conference of environmental ministers in Japan; Trump, meanwhile, used it as an opportunity to blame China and Japan for polluting the ocean.
The Outdoors Act guarantees permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund that is supposed to use offshore oil and gas revenue to support parks and coastal wilderness. For more than half a century, Congress has been diverting most of that revenue. Trump recognized the bill had broad support among hunters and recreational fishers, the “hook and bullet” constituency that he’s hoping to win in November. Democratic co-sponsors of the bill were not invited to the White House signing.
Following the BP Deep Water Horizon disaster of 2010, President Obama issued an executive order establishing a U.S. National Ocean Policy. It directed twenty-six federal agencies with involvement in ocean policy to better coordinate with each other and with state and tribal governments on ocean planning to reduce conflicts among stakeholders.
But after some Republican members of Congress labeled the order “Obamacare for the Ocean,” Trump decided that it had to go. He replaced it with his own 2018 order that emphasized offshore drilling. References to a healthy ocean and climate change were dropped and a requirement that Indigenous people be involved in decision-making was rescinded.
Trump has also halted federal participation in regional planning. While some states and coastal tribes have continued to work together trying to manage the nation’s shared waters, they’ve found it’s like trying to coordinate a pandemic response without federal support.
From the start, the Trump Administration has worked to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. This was a main focus of Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke (until he was forced to resign amid a storm cloud of scandals) and remains so for Zinke’s replacement, former oil lobbyist David Bernhardt. The administration’s goal is to open 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters, including Arctic waters, to drilling.
Meanwhile, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has revised safety regulations established in the wake of the BP disaster that killed eleven workers and devastated the Gulf of Mexico. This revision included easing up on safety standards for blowout preventers, and reducing well-testing times and crew-safety training.
Public resistance to new offshore drilling has grown particularly among East Coast residents, businesses, and politicians, both Democratic and Republican, with some unexpected consequences. Mark Sanford, a conservative Republican Congressman from deep red South Carolina who opposed drilling, lost his primary to a more pro-Trump (and pro-drilling) opponent, Republican state Representative Katie Arrington. She went on to lose this coastal seat to a Democrat, Joe Cunningham, whose opposition to offshore drilling was a major factor in his 2018 victory.
Still, the administration tried to push forward with seismic testing to locate sub-seabed oil. This testing involves frequent blasts of seismic air guns that can injure or kill marine mammals as well as fish, plankton, and other aquatic life.
In 2018, NOAA, part of the Department of Commerce, issued an “incidental take” permit to allow oil and gas companies to cause unintended injury or death to marine mammals while searching for oil between Florida and New Jersey, the migratory path of highly endangered North Atlantic right whales. Lawsuits have ensued.
Last year, NOAA became embroiled in controversy when Trump warned that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (an inaccuracy he later reinforced with a Sharpie on a storm track map). Several days after NOAA’s National Weather Service office in Alabama assured locals they were under no threat, NOAA issued a public rebuke to that office.
An internal NOAA report later found that Acting Administrator Neil Jacobs violated agency policy and suggested political appointees take “scientific integrity training.” An Inspector General’s report found that White House pressure (from then-Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross) left Jacobs believing that he would be fired unless he publicly backed Trump’s false claim.
Trump had earlier nominated Barry Myers to run NOAA. Myers, the chief executive officer of AccuWeather, a private company, had advocated privatizing the U.S. Weather Service. After two years without Senate confirmation, Myers withdrew his name.
The Trump Administration continues to use administrative actions, executive orders, and lax enforcement to undermine key U.S. laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Last spring, the EPA’s Wheeler set new cost/benefit calculations for mercury released from coal- and oil-fired power plants that will allow more of this heavy metal, which is linked to brain damage, to exit their smokestacks. Most of the mercury will rain out of clouds into the sea, where it bioaccumulates in ocean predators such as sharks, billfish, and tuna that are often then consumed by humans.
The administration remains determined to open the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to logging and, until recently (during the President’s re-election campaign), backed a massive gold and copper mining operation proposed upstream from Bristol Bay. Both pose threats to the healthiest remaining stocks of wild salmon in North America, as well as to the Alaskan fishing industry and the region’s communities that depend on them.
Along with a recreational fishing act signed in 2018 that removes catch limits on sport fishing but not commercial fishing, Trump has also pushed to undermine the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Since its 2006 reauthorization, this federal fishing law has helped restore depleted U.S. fish stocks and brought stability and sustainability to the industry. In August 2020, a federal court in Louisiana ruled that Trump could not order NOAA to help facilitate commercial offshore aquaculture operations, saying that it was Congress’s prerogative under the act.
The administration has done nothing for existing U.S. aquaculture, particularly the shellfish industry, that has been trying to adapt to serious impacts from ocean acidification while also seeing its onshore and nearshore facilities endangered by sea level rise.
Shortly after taking office, Trump reduced by 85 percent the size of the land-based Bears Ears National Monument in Utah (originally established by President Obama). He threatened to take similar action against four marine sanctuaries off the coast of California, but has not yet done so.
It wasn’t until June 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, that Trump took an unmasked trip to Maine to reopen the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing (also taking the occasion to call the Democratic governor a “dictator”). Established by President Obama in 2016, it is the only large marine reserve (almost 5,000 square miles) off the East Coast, and it’s home to deep-sea coral reefs, canyons, seamounts, and migratory right whales.
Maine fishermen have not been greatly helped by the reopening because most of them work closer to shore and are more concerned about the Chinese lobster tariff (imposed in retaliation for Trump’s trade war) and the collapse of their restaurant and other markets due to the pandemic.
With the election fast approaching, Trump recently reversed his “energy dominance” rhetoric and promised there would be no drilling off of the swing state of Florida. But an article in Politico, quoting four anonymous sources from the government and the fossil-fuel industry, says the administration actually will announce plans to drill off Florida a few weeks after the election, whether he’s re-elected or not.
Opponents of offshore drilling warn that a lame-duck Trump will likely also target California and the Mid-Atlantic for offshore drilling; a court ruling still prevents him from offering leases in Arctic waters. Ironically, the oil industry, currently in a historic slump, has expressed no desire to expand its offshore drilling, but leasing bids for offshore wind power permits have recently generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury.
Another possible scorched-earth target for a dethroned Trump would be the reopening of the Pacific’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to fishing, mining, and other industrial activities. At 583,000 square miles, this is the second-largest marine reserve in the world, larger than all U.S. National Parks combined. It includes a 1,200-mile stretch of ocean and small atolls between the main islands of Hawaii and Midway, where more than 70 percent of U.S. coral reefs are found, along with such rare and endangered species as monk seals, sea turtles, albatrosses, and tiger sharks. It is one of the last great ocean treasures.
While Trump’s approach to the ocean, the crucible of life on our blue planet, has alienated many coastal residents and businesses, conservationists, fishermen and women, surfers, scientists, and others, he’s proud of his remaining supporters. These include recreational powerboat and yacht owners who staged floating MAGA rallies, or “Trumptillas,” this summer in New Jersey, Florida, South Carolina, Southern California, and on a lake in Texas where at least four boats sank.
According to the National Marine Manufacturers Association, sales of boats thirty-three feet or longer in length have increased significantly since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Thank you. We love our boaters,” Trump tweeted.