Christopher Seufert photo
By John Pappalardo
The “Office of Seafood” is open for business.
Well not business exactly, though the idea is to support and promote American fishermen, the industry, and their businesses. This is a new, formal carve-out in the United States Department of Agriculture, created April 15, 2026. Here is the mission, as described by US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins:
“(P)rioritize customer service and ease of navigation for American seafood cultivators, producers, and processors to access USDA programs.”
If this new office even begins to make progress on this goal, it will be a huge positive step for American fishermen everywhere, our fleet included. Here’s why:
The USDA is a gigantic purchaser of food in our nation. Public schools, the military, prisons, food banks, all get meals from USDA-contracted suppliers, billions of dollars moving through the supply system via USDA contracts.
When it comes to protein, something like 98 percent of those contracts are dealt to three major food types: Beef, pork, and chicken. Only a tiny fraction goes toward fish, and almost all of that is spent on large factory-trawling operations off the West Coast (canning tuna for example) or Mid-West tilapia farms (if you consider tilapia a fish). Not our kind of fishing.
Big land-based processors have big advantages. For starters, they can produce in huge volume, predictable and uniform; if a USDA contract calls for 2 million pounds of frozen chicken nuggets, each exactly 4 ounces, they can do that. If the contract calls for 5 million pounds of hamburger in six-ounce patties, that’s what gets delivered.
Fishermen, and their processors, have a hard time matching that predictability and scale, especially smaller-boat fleets like ours.
There’s the political side too: Every state has chicken, beef, and/or pork farms and production. That means every Senator and many Congresspeople have constituents looking for USDA contracts. When it comes to fish, those elected advocates are clustered along coastlines, with less political clout. To think this doesn’t matter is naïve.
For years now, when it comes to Washington DC’s mysterious ways, people much smarter than me have been saying that the only way fishermen will get a more equitable share of USDA funding is when there is an office in the department dedicated to that cause, people whose job should depend on creating programs and funding, advocating and delivering.
So for years we have been pushing this idea, finding ways to put it on the table whenever and wherever we got the chance, joining other fishing organizations around the country who have done the same.
And now, lo and behold, it has come into being. The Trump administration shared credit with two Republican Senators, Dan Sullivan from Alaska and Susan Collins from Maine, for the restructuring, and there’s truth to that. But it has been a bipartisan effort for a long time, an idea that emerged from the fishing community itself.
This is a real breakthrough, but no panacea. The Office of Seafood will only be as successful as the people who serve in it; we know better than to think a federal bureaucratic identification guarantees real progress.
We also know that the USDA contracting process, skewed to huge bids and long timelines, is not friendly to local boats and more flexible, smaller harvesting in tune with the communities and habitat where we live and work.
But at least now we have two things: Federal recognition of the crucial role fishermen have played since the birth of the nation, feeding many, essential to our coastal society. And a federal focal point, a silo with officials whose titles include the word “Seafood,” who in theory at least can held accountable.
Alaska’s Senator Sullivan summed up the idealistic goal, important to articulate, setting a standard. This office has been created, he said, so fishermen “can continue to do what they do best: sustainably harvesting the freshest and healthiest wild seafood in the world.”
That describes fishermen around here pretty well. We’ll continue to advocate for them, with a new door in DC to knock on.
John Pappalardo is CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance