NOAA Fisheries just rewrote its own rulebook, and now it wants to grade its own homework. Last week, the agency announced new priorities that put four bedrock rules under review — the standards that prevent overfishing, require managers to use the best available science, account for the wider impact on coastal communities, and limit accidental bycatch of species nobody's trying to catch. These aren't red tape. They're the science-based guardrails that have helped American fisheries recover for decades under the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act.

NOAA calls this "cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first," according to the agency's own announcement. But scientists and conservationists who've spent careers studying these waters see something else happening. "The agency is taking a sharp turn away from science," said Andrea Treece, senior attorney in the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, in comments reported by Inside Climate News. Janet Coit, who directed NOAA Fisheries under the previous administration, has voiced similar concern about what happens to fish populations "future generations are counting on us to steward responsibly" if science-based limits get pushed aside.

Weakening these standards doesn't just put fish stocks at risk — it threatens the very fishing communities the agency claims to be protecting. Healthy oceans and strong, science-based regulation aren't opposing forces. One makes the other possible.

Tell NOAA's Administrator and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce: don't rewrite the National Standards that keep American fisheries science-based and sustainable. Sign the petition now — before the best available science becomes optional instead of the law.