Originally published in ecoRI News, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
PROVIDENCE — As chaos and uncertainty continue to be unleashed on federal agencies thanks to the policies of the Trump administration, the Ocean State’s blue economy is just starting to feel those downstream impacts.
While federal jobs by themselves don’t play an outsized role in the state’s economy, many functions of scientific marine research, marine resource management, and commercial fishing rely heavily on federal initiatives or funding.
The past few weeks have seen 800 probationary employees at the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fired without cause, and further deep cuts to agency staffing are expected by a March 13 deadline issued by the White House to its federal agency chiefs.
Many of the federal grants awarded to states, nonprofits or other nongovernmental agencies remain frozen and inaccessible, despite multiple court orders from multiple district judges to turn the funding spigot back on.
Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, explained how federal cuts into marine research had hamstrung a project to breed disease-resistant shellfish. The project, which Rheault said he advocated federal funding for over a decade and a half, originally fired almost all of the staff and scientists working on the project after Trump mandated budget cuts across the board from federal agencies.
Rheault said the project has been allowed to re-hire its scientists, a pair of geneticists, but the rest of the staff weren’t allowed back, effectively neutering the program.
“This is the antithesis of government efficiency, this is a calamity,” Rheault said at a roundtable Monday organized by Congressman Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., on the cuts to NOAA.
The event was meant to highlight the impact felt locally from federal budget cuts and layoffs handed down by the Trump administration and Elon Musk. Rhode Island, like all states in the country, rely heavily on federal funding to fund different parts of their economy.
Rhode Island also relies on federal funding for basic government functions when it comes to the environment. Around 25% of the Department of Environmental Management’s budget comes from federal sources, and a third of the Coastal Resources Management Council’s financing actually comes from NOAA.
Recent federal grants from NOAA, totaling around $1.5 million, helped DEM finally conclude its 10-year odyssey to remove a sunken, crane-topped barge from the Providence River, a prominent eyesore in the state’s capital city.
Like many state agencies, DEM, CRMC, and other government entities apply for federal grants and funding to complete projects for which most lawmakers would likely balk at footing the bill, or don’t have room for in state budgets.
Fred Mattera, a retired fisherman with some 40 years of experience, emphasized the need for scientific research done by NOAA’s commercial fisheries divisions. Mattera said in his career he’d seen climate change, and poor fish stock management, radically change the kind of fish it was possible to catch in order for commercial anglers to make a living.
Mattera pointed to the recent loss of NOAA funding by Maine’s Sea Grant program as a prime example. The Maine Sea Grant program is one of the few programs providing data on lobster stock in federal waters. Without data from that program and others like it, Mattera said, fishing stocks would suffer.
Another move opposed by commercial anglers like Mattera is the proposed privatization of the National Weather Service, an office within NOAA. The prospect, said Mattera, made him shudder.
“Poor [weather] forecasting can cause a loss of men and vessels,” he said. “It’s putting the life of hundreds of fishermen on the East Coast at serious risk.”
NOAA’s Narragansett Bay facility, next to the University of Rhode Island’s Bayside campus in Narragansett, saw all its probationary employees fired last week, according to a report from The Public’s Radio. The exact amount of federal firings in Rhode Island is unknown at this point, but is estimated to be less than 100.
“It was indiscriminate, it was not strategic,” said Janet Coit, a former DEM director and former administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, an office within NOAA. “You plan to make cuts that still sustain your core mission despite loss of staff. This did not happen that way.”
Magaziner warned the state may not feel the long-term impacts of cutting NOAA and Environmental Protection Agency funding for some time. What the state was seeing now was first-day impacts, but long-term damage is likely coming down the road, he said.
“Sometimes when you cut an agency to catastrophe on Day One, sometimes it takes a while to see the damage,” he said.
