Elon Musk’s government efficiency campaign may be the last, best chance to save beleaguered American fishing jobs from overregulation and foreign competition.

America’s fisheries run wide, from kids laying lobster traps in Maine’s inlets to crews braving Alaskan seas “Deadliest Catch” style. But America’s fishing fleet is rapidly aging — the average commercial fishermen is thought to be 55 — and overregulation is driving boats off the water and acting as a barrier to entry for the next generation.

A thorough review of our bloated fisheries bureaucracies will put the lie to the allegation that DOGE is oligarchic. Fishermen are not a powerful constituency in Washington. Unlike career civil servants, they have no tenure protections, no union to advocate for them, no pension to seed their retirements. As a result, they have been regulated to the brink, with alphabet soup agencies placing surveillance agents aboard their boats, closing huge swaths of the water for months at a time and ordering large amounts of gear removed from the water.

The economic footprint of our fisheries is much larger than the public appreciates. There are about 50,000 commercial fishermen working U.S. waters. Many fishermen work as independent operators or support small, intergenerational family businesses. These vessel workers, often braving dangerous conditions over long hours, support another 200,000 jobs onshore across sectors like processing, transportation and wholesale, and logistics like vessel repair or bait dealing. In Maine, lobstering alone accounts for over $1 billion of economic activity, according to a 2018 Colby College study.

In some parts of the country, fishing jobs are the only jobs going (and important to the tax base by extension). Take Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. The commercial fisheries support about 25,000 jobs in Louisiana. These jobs are concentrated in places like Terrebonne or Plaquemines parishes, remote and beautiful bayou communities where industry is otherwise scarce, and natural disasters make life wild and unpredictable.

Interestingly, overzealous environmentalists have already managed some of these very communities into decline, as with Washington and Hancock counties in Maine or communities on Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The logging industry once supported thousands of jobs in these areas, either through the timber processing supply chain or in closely related sectors such as paper manufacturing. But environmental interventions such as the quixotic bid to save the spotted owl (quixotic because spotted owl populations continue to decline and timber communities continue to struggle) effectively wiped out those industries.

All to say, the fisheries are especially sensitive to overregulation because businesses are small, and they are concentrated in coastal areas where economic alternatives are thin — in part because of overregulation.

The decline of America’s fisheries would be a loss for the American consumer and a boon to China. Seafood sourced from American fisheries accounts for just over 20% of seafood sold in the United States. Imports make up the balance. Some of those products come from reputable foreign sources such as Canada or Norway. But fishing is an industry notorious for poor quality control and human rights abuses. Sea slavery is a common practice on the southeast Asian fleet.

China’s mammoth commercial fishing fleet in particular is notorious for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Beijing’s armada sails the expanse of the world’s oceans, and has plundered whole regions dry to secure China’s dominant position in the seafood market. For example, Chinese overfishing drove a staggering 70% decline in squid stocks in Korean waters.

American consumers should not be made to support these practices because regulators are driving American fishermen off the water.

A fishermen’s advocacy group, the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, has furnished DOGE with recommendations for reforming the fisheries bureaucracy. One of its most sound suggestions is reallocating resources to boost U.S. seafood exports and promote our products on the international market. This would mark a sea change in America’s management of its fisheries.

For too long, bureaucrats have treated fishermen like interlopers on our oceans. Fishermen are job and value creators, and our government should treat them as such.