The budget released Monday by the White House would provide $7.3 million to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the Chesapeake Bay Program in the 2021 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That’s a 91% reduction from this year’s funding for the federal-state effort.

It’s the fourth time that the Trump administration has proposed slashing the Bay Program. In President Trump’s first year in office, he called for completely eliminating its federal funding. The last two years, he has proposed 90% reductions.

Congress rejected those proposals, and last year actually increased funding to $85 million for fiscal year 2020, up from $73 million in recent years.

Given that history, it’s likely Congress will restore much if not all of the funding for the Bay Program, which coordinates regional efforts to restore the Chesapeake and provides grants to states, local governments, universities and nonprofit organizations.

Even so, the administration’s proposal drew quick rebukes from environmentalists.

“This action continues President Trump’s assault on the Chesapeake Bay and clean water,”  William Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said in a statement. The Trump administration also is seeking to roll back or weaken many regulations aimed at protecting water quality, he added.

Baker noted that there are only five years left for all of the Bay watershed states to meet their cleanup obligations under the “pollution diet” that the EPA crafted in 2010. He warned that “this drastic cut could be the final nail in the coffin for science-based restoration efforts.”

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, pledged to work with other governors to restore Bay funding. “While the Trump administration continues to turn its back on the Bay, we will keep fighting to protect one of our most precious natural assets.”

He noted that the EPA Administrator stated at his confirmation hearing that he was committed to supporting the Bay Program. “Instead,” Hogan said, “the Trump administration recklessly and repeatedly proposes gutting Chesapeake Bay funding.”

As it has in previous years, the White House proposes to eliminate federal funding for most place-based ecosystem restoration efforts, including those focused on the Gulf of Mexico and the Long Island and Puget sounds. The budget summary suggests the work of these programs is best left to others. “State and local groups are engaged and capable of taking on management of cleanup and restoration of these water bodies,” it says.

The White House spending plan would continue full funding for the Great Lakes restoration effort of $320 million. Likewise, it would renew the $3.2 million for restoration work in Florida’s Everglades and the Keys. It said the “limited” funding proposed for the Bay Program would support “critical basinwide monitoring and state and local capacity building.”

A White House budget summary says these restoration efforts, apparently in contrast with the others, require a “uniquely federal role” focused on continuous long-term monitoring of the watersheds, given the “current lack of capacity for non-Federal groups to take on this role.”

The proposed Bay Program cut is part of a larger, continuing effort by the Trump administration — also mostly rebuffed in past by Congress — to make sweeping reductions in federal spending on environmental programs and agencies. The EPA overall would get nearly $6.7 billion under the White House proposal, which is 26% less than the current funding level.

The U.S. Geological Survey is targeted for a 24% cut overall, but its ecosystems research efforts would be reduced by almost half.

Details of the administration’s funding proposal remain unknown for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which works on everything from fisheries management to climate research. The Commerce Department’s budget summary says NOAA’s spending remains under review.  The White House budget summary, though, says “lower priority” NOAA grant and education efforts would be zeroed out, including coastal zone management and the Sea Grant program, which among other things funds coastal and Great Lakes research.

Elsewhere in the federal budget, funds for land acquisition at the Department of Interior and in the U.S. Forest Service would be slashed by more than 90%, from $227 million this year to $18 million in fiscal 2021. The budget document cites the need for those departments to focus on core missions like fighting fires and addressing a maintenance backlog on existing federal lands.

By Timothy B. Wheeler

The only exception is in Maryland, where state officials plan to let those who can afford to pay for charter fishing trips bring home two of the highly prized rockfish, as they are known in the Bay.

And there’s still more controversy about Maryland’s plan to stem the slide of the East Coast’s most popular finfish. The state has shortened but not closed its spring “trophy season,” when anglers can go after the biggest of the species, even though those happen to be the most productive spawners. And the state is planning to crack down on anglers who “target” rockfish for catch-and-release during times when it’s illegal to keep them.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates fishing for migratory species in near-shore waters, on Tuesday authorized a patchwork of catch restrictions to be imposed along the coast and in the Bay aimed at halting a troubling decline in the species. They did so only after a lengthy and at-times querulous debate about the efficacy and fairness of states’ varied rules.

Maryland’s proposed catch restrictions came in for particular scrutiny from critics who questioned the science behind the proposal and whether it would actually meet the commission’s requirements.

The action approved this week comes after scientists warned nearly a year ago that the Atlantic striped bass population was overfished, with the number of spawning age females at a worrisome low.

The commission last fall called for states to make an 18% reduction in the catch of striped bass as well as in their deaths after being caught and released. The panel directed that all anglers be limited to catching one fish a day. It also set uniform size limits for keeping fish caught along the Atlantic coast and in the Bay, a major spawning and nursery ground for the species.

States were permitted, though, to deviate from those cutbacks, as long as their rules reduced overall fish losses by the same amount.

Most of the states from Maine to North Carolina took advantage of that “conservation equivalency” provision, submitting dozens of varied options in all for regulating recreational fishing in their waters. The commission’s striped bass management board spent hours reviewing and debating them.

Chris Moore, senior regional ecosystem scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said he was heartened by the “robust discussion” of state proposals. While acknowledging the merits of finding state-specific solutions, Moore said that “these plans must meet the required conservation objectives and provide a means of ensuring accountability if conservation targets are not met.”

That’s especially important in the Bay, Moore added, because about 70% of the coastwide stock of striped bass are spawned there.

Fishery managers in the Bay states of Maryland and Virginia proposed curtailing the recreational catch more than the commercial harvest, even though the commission had called for both sectors to share equally in the reductions.

Managers did so in large part to protect the livelihoods of watermen, but they also noted that recreational fishing accounts for a larger share of the striped bass losses. Anglers catch many more of the fish than their commercial counterparts, and still more die at anglers’ hands after being caught and then released because they were undersized or hooked out of season.

In Maryland and in the Potomac River, regulators proposed shaving the commercial harvest by only 1.8%, while aiming for a recreational catch 20.6 % below 2017 levels. The Virginia Marine Resources Commission, meanwhile, acted last year to reduce the commercial catch in the Bay by nearly 8%, while going for a 24% overall reduction in recreational losses in both the ocean and the Bay.

Virginia eliminated its spring trophy season for striped bass last year shortly after the scientists’ warning came out. The state commission also adopted recreational rules last summer limiting anglers, including charter customers, to one fish per day year-round, down from two before.

Under the Maryland plan, its trophy season remains in place, though it’s delayed and shortened. There will also be a roughly two-week closure in late August, and the season will close for the year five days early in December.

Anglers also will be forbidden to “target” striped bass for catch-and-release during the late summer closure and throughout April, just before the trophy season starts on May 1.

State officials say they want to curtail catch-and-release, a popular sport fishing practice, because scientists have found a significant percentage of fish die after being hooked and returned to the water. That mortality is highest in summer, when warm water and lower oxygen levels add to the stress of being caught and handled.

But the commission’s technical committee expressed a lack of confidence that a “no targeting” rule would reduce catch-and-release as much as Maryland managers calculated it would. The committee also questioned how well the rule could be enforced, because there’s often not one fishing method or gear that’s uniquely used for hooking striped bass.

Michael Luisi, the DNR’s director of fishery monitoring and assessment, defended the state’s plan. He said the spring trophy season represented the only opportunity for Maryland anglers to catch the larger fish that can be caught most of the rest of the year roaming the coast.

He said that charter boat customers would be allowed to keep twice as many fish as private anglers because charter captains fear that a one-fish-a-day limit would kill their businesses.

Luisi also said the state has had a “no targeting” rule in effect for years in certain parts of the Bay and has cited anglers for violating it.

Dan McKiernan, a Massachusetts fisheries official and board member, still expressed dismay that Maryland and Virginia had shifted so much of the reductions to recreational anglers.

“It really surprises me that states can manipulate that rule and favor commercial over recreational,” he said. “I think that that shouldn’t have been allowed. No one communicated to us that you didn’t have to comply with that rule. That’s disturbing.”

Maryland’s plan won the board’s approval, by a 10–3 vote, with two abstentions.

Environmental and sportfishing advocates questioned the decision.

“Unfortunately, serious concerns remain that Maryland’s plan will achieve the needed conservation benefit,” the Bay Foundation’s Chris Moore said. He noted that Maryland has failed in the past to limit striped bass harvest as much as it said it would, and he called for a “more risk-averse approach.”

David Sikorski, executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association Maryland, representing about 1,400 saltwater anglers, likewise questioned the adequacy of the plan. He also complained that it placed an unwarranted and unfair share of reductions on sports anglers.

Allowing charter fishing clients to keep more fish “pits portions of the recreational fishery against each other,” he said. He also contended that there’s no justification for barring catch-and-release fishing in April, when the greatest mortality threat is midsummer. He likened that restriction to “holding the lettuce on a double bacon cheeseburger and pretending you’re on a diet.”

The DNR will soon publish its proposed regulatory changes for the summer and winter striped bass seasons. Once the regulations are proposed, the public will get a chance to comment. The states’ rules for curtailing striped bass mortality are to be in place by April 1.

There was no telling how many blue crabs it held until the crab pot broke the surface. Wood shook the cage over a black plastic tray until the nine crabs inside finished tumbling out.

He picked them up one by one with a gloved hand and called out their gender to his two crewmates. Then, he used a metal ruler to measure them from one far tip of the shell to the other.

Eight were big enough for keeping, perhaps to be boiled and eaten over a paper tablecloth at a seafood joint in Baltimore or beyond. But that was not to be these crabs’ destiny.

Wood is an undergraduate student at the College of Southern Maryland, but his work on this overcast November morning was part of a study led by Morgan State University. Along with two veteran Chesapeake Bay researchers, he is hoping to inject some science into what heretofore has been an art: determining how far apart crab pots should be placed from one another.

That is, if the crabs were willing to give up their secrets. And that was anything but assured.

Crab pots are end-table-size traps with a funnel that allows the catch to enter but not escape. They are the backbone of the Bay’s commercial crabbing industry — some watermen fish several hundred at a time to make a living.

Tom Ihde is a fisheries ecologist at Morgan State as well as Wood’s mentor and co-author on the study. He has long wondered if the pots compete for the same crabs if they’re placed too close to each other. But placing them too far apart could cause watermen to spend needless time and diesel on the water.

It isn’t merely an academic matter, Ihde said. At the height of the Bay’s crab season in the summer and early fall, the buoys marking the location of crab pots are often so thick “you have to zigzag around to get your boat through,” he said. Solving the aquatic mystery could save untold expenses in a region home to more than one-third of the nation’s blue crab catch, he said.

“Every little bit matters on the water,” said Ihde, who began studying the Bay as a graduate student in 1997. “The profit margins are small. Every little bit of fuel you can save by not traveling as far, all of that is going to help the bottom line.”

Two watermen contacted for this article, though, were skeptical that science can explain something as inscrutable as the whims of blue crabs.

When told about the Morgan State study, Blair Baltus laughed heartily. “Answer me one question: How much grant money did they get to do this?” he asked. “This is about the most entertaining story I’ve heard of in my whole life.”

(Morgan State dipped into its own funds to cover the study, Ihde said. No grants were used.)

A lifelong crabber, the Baltimore County-based Baltus said it costs him $600 a day for bait, fuel and hired help, a figure that doesn’t include health insurance, boat maintenance, gear and other costs. But a robust rise in crab abundance — scientists estimate nearly 600 million crabs populated the Bay before last season began and the highest total since 2012 — helped to keep his business afloat.

“I can tell you three things” about crabs, Baltus said. “They swim, they feed every now and then and they taste good. Other than that, everything else about a Chesapeake blue crab is a hypothesis.”

Bill Kilinski, a Charles County waterman, called the study an “interesting concept,” but he also doubted that it would bear fruit.

For his part, Kilinski keeps things simple on the water. If crabs are plentiful in an area, he makes sure his crab pots are plentiful, too.

“Normally, as a waterman, it kind of takes care of itself,” he said.

The crab pot study is a side project of the venerable blue crab population survey conducted annually by Morgan State’s Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory (PEARL). The research, begun in 1968 and supported in recent years by Dominion Energy Solutions, represents one of the longest-running studies of marine populations in the world.

Wood graduated with an associate’s degree at the end of the fall semester and plans to enroll in the fisheries and wildlife biology program at Frostburg State University in the fall. He snagged an internship at PEARL last summer.

In Wood, Ihde found a fellow traveler with a curiosity about crab pots. They tried their study in the summer, but the results were fouled because of low dissolved oxygen conditions at one of the pot locations.

So, they tried again from September through November. They used eight crab pots. Four were spaced a half-mile apart from one another, far enough to theoretically simulate harvesting crabs without interference from other pots.

To test the opposite scenario, the team lashed one pot to another, then repeated the process with the two remaining pots. Those “paired” traps were lowered into the water in separate locations.

They conducted the experiment in the Patuxent River, a Chesapeake Bay tributary, about three miles upstream from Maryland Route 4 bridge near the town of Solomons. They didn’t have to worry about commercial traps getting in their way because the state prohibits commercial fishermen from using crab pots in Bay tributaries. Using crab pots for research purposes is allowed.

“It’s a near-perfect laboratory for us,” Ihde said.

The study involved setting the pots by boat nine times over the course of the three months and checking them about 24 hours later for crabs. Wood tossed any crabs they caught back into the water after performing his check.

If the team’s research showed a difference between the two types of pot settings, their reward would be getting to do more research. They planned to conduct a second phase, cataloging catches at varying pot distances to determine which yields the most crustaceans.

But the second phase wasn’t needed. By early December, the results were in. The watermen appeared to be right. There was no difference between the paired pots and their far-apart cousins, according to Ihde’s initial review of the data.

“They’re not the results we expected or thought we’d see, but they’re results,” Ihde said. “From a scientific perspective, though, that’s exactly what the process is supposed to do.”

Maybe blue crabs don’t care whether traps are nestled tightly together or flung widely across the Bay’s dusky floor. Because the study was conducted in the fall, when crabs are migrating, the time of year may have affected the results, Ihde said, adding that he might test the question again during a future summer.

But there’s another positive outcome from the just-completed study, he noted.

“To me, from the get-go, the real product of the project was Kyle himself and what he got out of it,” Ihde said. “He came in here with an interest in science but no real experience. Through his work with us over the last eight months now, he’s leaving this as an experienced field biologist.”