America’s seafood leaders are pushing back on new plans from Democrats on Capitol Hill to revive a legal doctrine that fishermen say threatens to “silence” them.

On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led several of her Democrat colleagues in introducing the Stop Corporate Capture Act (SCCA), which she says is aimed at stopping corporations from “hijacking” the government. 

The bill would codify what’s known as the Chevron doctrine – a legal theory established in the 1980s that says if a federal regulation is challenged, the courts should defer to the expertise of the agency. 

The Supreme Court last month overruled that doctrine, the result of a lawsuit filed by fishermen against the government claiming that it imposed rules on their industry that Congress did not allow. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that Chevron deference “permits the Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it.”

HOW MAINE LOBSTERMEN TURNED ‘SLAP IN THE FACE’ FROM WHITE HOUSE INTO POLICY VICTORY

With the new threat of the Chevron doctrine finding permanence in federal law, New England fishermen are crying foul and pointing to the recent offshore wind disaster wreaking havoc on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket as a prime example of why lawmakers should not give “expert bureaucrats” power over their industry. 

“So-called expert bureaucrats approved the Vineyard Wind turbines that are falling apart in Senator Warren’s home state, spreading debris from Nantucket to Cape Cod. Fishermen have always known that offshore wind will be a disaster for our oceans. But alphabet soup agencies used Chevron deference to silence us,” Jerry Leeman, CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), told Fox News Digital. 

NEFSA CEO Jerry Leeman says, “So-called expert bureaucrats approved the Vineyard Wind turbines that are falling apart in Senator Warren’s home state, spreading debris from Nantucket to Cape Cod.” (Courtesy Jerry Leeman)

“Without Chevron, fishermen finally have a chance to protect their jobs, heritage, communities and the marine environment from regulators and developers who are industrializing the ocean.”

Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between foreign entities Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which built wind farms off the coast of Massachusetts. 

Earlier this month, a blade the length of a football field snapped off a wind turbine, sending debris and shards of fiberglass into the ocean, much of which washed ashore in Nantucket.

MAINE LOBSTERMEN CATCH BIG COURT VICTORY AGAINST BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ‘EGREGIOUS’ REGULATIONS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview on Capitol Hill on July 12, 2023. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

NEFSA and other groups like the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) have pushed back against the Biden administration’s offshore wind development, but so far to no avail. 

Notably, Vineyard Wind is a recipient of a 30% tax break carved out by the Inflation Reduction Act, which extended and increased tax credits for wind energy projects that began construction prior to Jan. 1, 2025.

The concern over the Chevron doctrine being codified in law is that fishermen like Leeman, who contend that they are the true experts in their own industry, are outweighed by government agencies that regulate them if a court challenge arises.

Steve Forbes said, “Sen. Warren’s attacks on America’s small and family businesses knows no bounds. She wants to put bureaucrats back in charge of small businesses when the Supreme Court rightfully liberated them from big government.”

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION BLASTED FOR ‘HYPOCRISY’ ON OFFSHORE WIND AS IT SCRAMBLES TO PROBE WHALE DEATHS

Maine lobstermen haul in their latest catch off the state’s coast. (Maine Lobstermens Association/Marketing Collaborative)

“The new bill from Sen. Warren and the far-left in Congress to codify the Chevron Doctrine into law is an attempted end-run around the Supreme Court’s recent ruling reining in unaccountable federal agencies,” said Elaine Parker of the Job Creators Network Foundation. 

“Sen. Warren and her band are trying to farm out their job of legislating to bureaucrats, making it easier to grow the size and scope of the federal government at the expense of Main Street,” Parker said, adding that the bill is “likely unconstitutional.” 

“This [bill] shows once again that Democrats side with regulators over ordinary Americans,” she said. 

Warren’s office did not return Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

The shake-up at the top of the ticket made political waves down-ballot when President Biden suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris to run his office last Sunday. On Friday, U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick toured a natural gas plant in Warren, Pennsylvania, to contrast his “all of the above energy” goals with Harris’ resurfaced comments from her 2020 campaign that she would ban fracking.

McCormick was quick to pivot to Harris this past week as he vies for Sen. Bob Casey’s seat, considered one of the most likely pickups for Republicans to regain control of the chamber. McCormick released an ad Tuesday clipping Harris’ most liberal comments with Casey’s endorsement, calling Harris “the most liberal presidential nominee in U.S. history.” The McCormick campaign points to Casey endorsing Harris as proof that he is “deeply out of step with the needs of Pennsylvanians.” A 60-second version of the ad will air Monday during the Olympics in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre and Pittsburgh markets.

HARRIS’ FAVORABILITY SEES DRAMATIC SPIKE AFTER BIDEN DROPS OUT: POLL

Former President Trump and McCormick, who have both committed to unleashing American energy as pillars of their campaigns, latched onto comments made by then-presidential candidate Harris, including at a CNN town hall in 2019: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

Reacting to Harris’ resurfaced comments at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump said, “She wants no fracking.” Harris and her campaign have since walked back those now-viral comments about fracking.

“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” a spokesperson for the Harris campaign shared in a statement with Fox News. “The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production. This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years.”

When asked by Fox News about Harris’ comments, McCormick pointed instead to the Biden-Harris administration’s record on energy, painting a conflicting view from the one presented by the Harris campaign.

“In this crazy effort to eliminate fossil fuel consumption in our country with all the EPA regulations, the ban on fracking, the LNG pause and killing the Keystone pipeline, the Biden administration has put hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to transition to EVs and to solar panels,” McCormick said. “The majority of those solar panels and lithium batteries come from China, so in this crazy strategy of the radical environmental left, we’ve made ourselves more dependent on our greatest adversary. That’s the folly of the Biden administration’s energy policy: bad for security, bad for our economy and bad for the environment. We need pro-energy policies that open up the opportunity here in Pennsylvania.”

In a Fox News exclusive, McCormick toured Bull Run Energy in Warren, Pennsylvania, on Friday. Co-founded by Justin Hansen and Sam Harvey, the duo oversees 19 employees, 1,400 oil wells and drill and frack five or six wells a year. Most of the oil they produce becomes products like lipstick and other lubricants and everyday products.

“Our company is very small,” Harvey told Fox News Friday. “We have 21 total employees, including myself and Justin. All the shallow conventional operators in northwest Pennsylvania are small businesses, so this is not Big Oil. This is people trying to make a living. It’s a very marginal business. It’s hard to make a living doing this.”

Harvey outlined the difficulty of a one-size-fits-all approach to energy regulation, advocating to scale restrictions to the size and operation of an oil or gas business. Under the Biden-Harris administration, he said the top-down approach hasn’t matched the reality on the ground. 

“Over the past three or four years, we’ve had a lot of regulations that have been rolling down from the federal government,” Harvey said. “They roll down to the state government, and then they’re just now starting to get implemented toward us. What we’re seeing is that a lot of these regulations are designed for Big Oil companies that are drilling unconventional, deep horizontal wells. It doesn’t seem like the folks who wrote the regulations in D.C. have ever come out and visited what these shallow, conventional operations are like. The language doesn’t even fit what we’re doing here.”

Vice President Harris (ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)

McCormick told Fox News he visited Bull Run energy to do just that – see how small gas and oil operations are run so he’s equipped to legislate on Pennsylvania’s energy economy.

“I want to make sure I understand all the issues associated with our energy economy,” McCormick said. “So that when I’m a senator, I can be a pro-energy senator that does all the things necessary to make sure our energy sector develops.”

Earlier this year, McCormick unveiled his “Keystone Agenda,” which includes “unleashing Pennsylvania energy.” The policy platform lays out a plan to remove Biden-era restrictions on gas and oil projects, embrace “all of the above” energy production, and use America’s natural resources to build energy independence and national security.  

“We’re blessed in Pennsylvania with the fourth-largest natural gas reserves in the world,” McCormick added. “We just can’t get access to them, and we can’t get them into the hands of consumers around the United States and around the world. That’s the key. Pennsylvania’s senator should be fighting for those things. Bob Casey has been weak every step of the way and has been for more regulations and eventually the elimination of fossil fuels. That’s bad for Pennsylvanians and bad for America.”

SOME SAN FRANCISCO DEMOCRATS AREN’T SOLD ON KAMALA HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT: ‘MIXED FEELINGS’

In response, the Casey campaign doubled down on the senator’s commitment to “responsible fracking” and his voting record against fracking bans.

President Biden (Fox News)

“David McCormick is grasping at straws because the people of Pennsylvania have figured out what he really is – a Connecticut hedge fund mega-millionaire who lied about where he lives, supports a dangerous abortion ban, built up the Chinese military, and invested millions in China’s largest fentanyl producer,” a Casey campaign spokesperson shared with Fox News. “Meanwhile, Bob Casey supports fracking and is actually delivering for the Commonwealth by holding greedy corporations accountable, lowering costs, and supporting veterans and seniors.”

“This race and this election is about two fundamentally different views of the world and how we should lead our country forward; how we can have an economy that’s for working people, how we have secure borders, how we have a robust energy sector so we can be an energy superpower,” McCormick told Fox News on Friday. “That’s the choice between Biden-Harris-Casey. Now, Harris-Casey versus McCormick-Trump at the top of the ticket. It’s a fundamentally different view.”

Among its many sweeping calls for change in American government, a conservative platform document known as Project 2025 urges the demolition of some of the nation’s most dependable resources for tracking weather, combating climate change and protecting the public from environmental hazards.

“Break up NOAA,” the document says, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its six main offices, including the 154-year-old National Weather Service.

“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the document says.

The call to dismantle a vital federal department has raised the hackles of experts who say NOAA provides not only important free data, such as weather forecasts and satellite observations, but also life-saving information about hurricanes, heat waves, atmospheric rivers and other extreme events — many of which have been shown, through myriad studies, to be worsening due to global warming.

“The National Weather Service, and NOAA more generally, is a key agency in tracking what’s happening with our climate — and in particular the ways in which humans are changing the climate,” said Matthew Sanders, a lecturer at Stanford Law School and the acting deputy director of the Environmental Law Clinic.

“To propose undercutting, breaking up and quote-unquote streamlining NOAA is really an effort to block and make less available information about climate change in order to serve an agenda of climate change denial,” he said.

The 922-page document was published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Among its arguments for dismantling NOAA are concerns about the agency’s mission as well as its size. It notes that NOAA is the largest agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce, uses about half of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget in a typical year, and contains more than half of its personnel.

“This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable,” the document says. “That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”

Satellite imagery of a California storm from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

(NOAA / National Weather Service)

The plan also states that forecasts provided by private companies such as AccuWeather are more accurate than those provided by the National Weather Service, and so it recommends that the NWS “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” or enter partnerships to sell its data.

In a statement, AccuWeather’s chief executive Steven R. Smith said the company has not suggested that the NWS commercialize its operations, nor does it agree with the view outlined in the plan. AccuWeather relies on NOAA’s weather data as one of 190 sources in its forecast engine, and also partners with NOAA and dozens of other government agencies to share life-saving weather alerts with the public, Smith said.

“AccuWeather is extremely proud of our track record of superior accuracy, but it has never been our goal to take over the provision of all weather information,” he said.

In fact, AccuWeather is only one of many agencies and research institutions that depend on NOAA’s ground instruments, satellites, balloons, weather models and forecasts to aid in their own outlooks and analyses, according to Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit organization focused on environmental data science.

“Lots of people rely on the information that NOAA has collected and provides, and NOAA in turn has provided one of the most comprehensive weather monitoring systems in the world,” Rohde said.

Breaking up the agency would not only be detrimental to the American public, it would also be harmful to the advancement of science, according to Rohde. Blaming NOAA for climate change alarmism is akin to wanting to “shoot the messenger,” he said.

“NOAA has been a key resource in the federal government in providing information about climate change and communicating the risks, and they do so in a very responsible way,” Rohde said. “I don’t think they hype it up — they’re not saying the world is ending. But it is a risk on the horizon that has impacts, and the world is changing, and I think we need to face that with open eyes.”

Scott Smullen, deputy director of communications with NOAA, declined to comment on Project 2025, saying “we don’t speculate on what might or might not happen with the agency.”

A woman holds a Project 2025 fan at the Iowa State Fair, in Des Moines, recently.

(Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press)

The section of Project 2025 pertaining to NOAA was authored by Thomas Gilman, who served as assistant secretary of commerce and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce during Donald Trump’s presidential administration.

Prior to that appointment, Gilman was chief executive of Chrysler Financial and spent more than four decades in the global automotive industry, a sector closely tied to oil and gas interests. Gilman is currently director of ACLJ Action, an advocacy organization “dedicated to liberty, constitutional government and religious freedom,” according to its website. He is also chairman of Torngat Metals, a rare earth development company.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request to speak with Gilman for this article.

In recent weeks, Trump has distanced himself from the plan — stating on social media that he knows nothing about Project 2025 and that he has “no idea who is behind it.”

However, the plan includes contributions from other members of his Republican administration, including former budget director Russell Vought; former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn; former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson; and former chief of staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mandy Gunasekara. Trump’s name is mentioned in the document more than 300 times.

Project 2025 isn’t solely focused on weather. Its sweeping recommendations include plans to restrict abortion and contraceptives, cut social security, outlaw pornography, end marriage equality, end student loan relief efforts and eliminate other federal agencies such as the Department of Education.

On the environment, it calls for increased Arctic drilling, the deregulation of the oil industry, the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act — President Biden’s landmark climate legislation — and withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, among other recommendations.

Rohde, of Berkeley Earth, said moving away from international goals to reduce fossil fuel emissions “will necessarily lead to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and higher temperatures in the future.” The planet just recorded its hottest-ever daily global temperature, and has experienced a record 12 consecutive months of warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius, an international limit established under the Paris agreement.

Rohde also cautioned that privatizing or commercializing NOAA would lead to less available data for scientific researchers. Such outcomes have already been seen in other countries that have tried similar models, such as France, which only recently committed to making more of its weather archives public, he said.

“You really talk about throwing away the baby with the bathwater if you cut off the access to those measurement programs and those monitoring programs by making them commercial so that only a few organizations will have them,” he said.

A National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard helps to monitor Hurricane Hilary in August 2023.

(Ringo Chiu/For The Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Project 2025 also calls for the repeal of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s America the Beautiful Initiative. That plan, sometimes referred to as 30×30, seeks to conserve at least 30% of the U.S.’s land and waters by 2030, and has been hailed by environmental groups as a critical step for reversing habitat and species loss and ensuring access to nature for future generations.

Project 2025 says the initiative is being used to “advance an agenda to close vast areas of the ocean to commercial activities, including fishing, while rapidly advancing offshore wind energy development to the detriment of fisheries and other existing ocean-based industries.”

But the 30×30 initiative builds on existing legal authorities to achieve the benefits of conservation, including prudent efforts to avoid over-extracting land and water resources, according to Sanders, of Stanford, who also served as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s environment and natural resources division. Withdrawing from such an effort is “not a good idea,” he said.

“I think we find that every time we use one of these authorities to set aside an area for conservation, whether on a short-term or a longer-term basis, we look back at that decision as being enlightened, meaning that it was an exercise in wisdom to promote benefits that benefit humanity long term,” Sanders said.

Those conservation efforts, as well as the services provided by NOAA and the NWS, are deeply familiar to most Californians.

The agency is often the first to foresee potentially dangerous events — such as atmospheric rivers, extreme heat waves, fire weather conditions or even a rare West Coast hurricane — and disseminate information to the public.

And while Trump has publicly shied away from Project 2025, the former president’s first administration included efforts to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations and pare down the functions of some federal agencies. Trump also appointed climate change deniers to senior posts in the Department of the Interior, the EPA and other departments.

Many Californians may recall a tense 2020 exchange between Trump and Wade Crowfoot, the state’s natural resources secretary, over explosive wildfires and record-breaking temperatures that plagued the state that year.

“It’ll start getting cooler — you just watch,” Trump told Crowfoot at the time.

“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot countered.

“I don’t think science knows,” Trump said.

To break up NOAA and dismantle the National Weather Service would be like a return to those years “on steroids,” Sanders said, as such efforts would severely hamper the federal government’s ability to understand or take action on climate change.

It would also shift the onus of gathering and distributing critical climate and weather information onto state and local agencies, who are not singularly equipped to handle the magnitude of the challenge.

“That’s inherently less efficient and that handicaps informed decision-making — particularly when you’re dealing with something like climate change, which is not a local issue,” Sanders said. “It has local impacts, but it’s a national and international issue, so you need agencies that have the resources and the focus of tracking that kind of problem at a more national level.”