Trump Administration Announces First Step in Rolling Back Rule Protecting Whales

The Trump administration today took the first official step in rolling back a 2008 regulation vital to protecting critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from deadly vessel strikes. Filed in the Federal Register, NOAA Fisheries’ advance notice of proposed rulemaking indicates the administration’s intention to “deregulate” a successful program that protects right whales in limited seasonal areas where they are most at risk from large vessel strikes. Vessel strikes, together with fishing gear entanglements, are killing right whales faster than they can reproduce.

“Even though we are not surprised by this announcement, it’s still a major gut punch,” said Jane Davenport, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “This administration is hellbent on weakening a regulation with a proven track record of saving right whales and other large whales under the guise of economic security, when the agency’s own expert analysis has already demonstrated that this rule has minimal economic impacts.”

The 2008 vessel speed rule requires seasonal slowdowns for vessels 65 feet (the size of a school bus) in U.S. waters along the East Coast. The rule sets mandatory speed limits in seasonal management areas where right whales and high vessel traffic overlap. Voluntary dynamic management areas are triggered by right whale detections, but mariner compliance is low. 

With a population of roughly 384 individuals and only 70 breeding females, the North Atlantic right whale is at serious risk of extinction if additional conservation measures to reduce entanglements and vessel strikes are not implemented quickly. Females, calves and juveniles are at disproportionate risk of vessel strikes. Since 2017 alone, vessel strikes are confirmed to have killed 15 right whales, seriously injured another three whales and injured or caused poor health in an additional nine whales.

The advance notice cites a goal of replacing current seasonal speed restrictions with “advanced, technology-based, strike avoidance measures” at a time when no such avoidance measures have been proven to reduce strike risk to the same degree as a speed limit.

“Although developing technologies may one day augment mandatory speed limits, we cannot run a high-tech science experiment on the right whale’s survival,” said Davenport. “We would be signing this species’ extinction warrant if we undermine the vessel speed rule now.”

NOAA Fisheries will open a 90-day comment period on the advance notice of proposed rulemaking. No changes to the 2008 rule can be made until after the agency releases a proposed rule for notice and comment and publishes a final rule after analyzing those comments.

Less than four years ago, in August 2022, NOAA Fisheries proposed to expand the 2008 vessel speed rule, finding that the best available scientific evidence demonstrates reducing vessel speed is one of the most effective, feasible options to reduce lethal strike risk and that seasonal areas should be expanded and that speed limits should be mandatory in dynamic areas. Unfortunately, the proposed rule was not finalized.

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