WASHINGTON, DC -- Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, expects a warm welcome from all of the members of Congress he sees when he visits here this week to argue for preservation of the US Sea Grant program among other things.

That was how he was received when he made a similar trip to Capitol Hill roughly a year ago, after President Donald Trump first advocated for zeroing out the funds, he said.

“As we walked around the Hill, all of the East Coast state congressmen we visited pointed out to us that Congress decides the budget, not the president,” he said, adding: “I feel optimistic.”

The White House again has put the Sea Grant program on the chopping block, advocating for the elimination of its $72 million in federal funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) fiscal 2019 budget along with a number of other science measures, including especially those related to climate change.

In all, the Trump administration wants to cut 20% from NOAA’s $5.7 billion budget, leaving it with $4.6bn in fiscal 2019, which starts on Oct. 1, 2018.

So Rheault -- along with 16 of his colleagues from the East Coast shellfish community and some friends from the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association -- will again be asking lawmakers to spare the program. Together they'll log 40 meetings with agency and congressional offices as part of what is commonly referred to in Washington as a "fly-in".

The program's champions will get another chance to visit with members of Congress when James Hurley, the Sea Grant Association (SGA) president, leads a group of university Sea Grant leaders to the Hill in conjunction with SGA's March 7-8 meeting in Washington. Hurley is also head of the program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Trump administration's effort to cut the Sea Grant program in the fiscal 2018 budget has not yet been realized. But, that is as much due to Congress' inability to agree on how to fund the government as it is to lawmakers' disdain for the idea. Congress has yet been able to only muster a series of stop-gap measures known as continuing resolutions for the fiscal year, the most recent of which was signed earlier this month and expires on March 23.

Still, a strong bipartisan show of support for the program was evident in two separate "dear colleague" letters sent last spring. One is signed by 95 members of the House of Representatives' and the other is signed by 22 members of the Senate.

More recently, in January, 22 Democratic and one Independent senators sent a letter to the White House, arguing for its preservation in advance of Trump's proposed budget. Among the notable signatories were Christopher Murphy (Connecticut), Cory Booker (New Jersey), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Dianne Feinstein (California) and Bernie Sanders (Vermont).

“Sea Grant is vital to local businesses and an important part of preserving coastal communities for generations to come,” the letter states. “We urge you to provide robust support for the program in your final fiscal year 2019 budget.”

Born in the back of a cab

It was the US Land Grant program, created by legislation aimed at helping the American agriculture industry and signed by president Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s, that inspired University of Minnesota professor Athelstan Spilhaus to first suggest such a measure for the country’s coastlines in 1963.

Spilhaus, a South African-born geophysicist, oceanographer and comic strip author who was later described by Walter Cronkite as the most interesting man he ever interviewed, said he got the idea for Sea Grant while riding in a taxi on his way to an American Fisheries Society meeting. He had been invited as the keynote speaker, but was not yet prepared with his remarks.

“Establishment of the Land Grant colleges was one of the best investments this nation ever made,” Spilhaus wrote later in an editorial. “That same kind of imagination and foresight should be applied to exploitation of the sea."

President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Sea Grant College and Program Act, a bill introduced by Rhode Island Democratic senator Claiborne Pell, into law in October 1966. John Knauss, often credited as being another key contributor to the creation of the Sea Grant program, later went on to champion it as undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere at the Department of Commerce and NOAA administrator (1989-1993).

Similar to the older Land Grant program, the Sea Grant relies on the work of 33 universities across the US, including eight in states that border the Great Lakes and one in the US territory of Guam. States and other non-federal sources are required to deliver matching funds, doubling the impact of the program. The funding amounts are not evenly distributed, but determined on a merit basis.

Sea Grant funds deliver a lot of bang for the buck, based on an analysis of the $67m in federal money the program received in 2015. It helped to sustain or create 2,903 businesses and 20,770 jobs, delivering an economic return of $575m, an 854% impact.

Nearly 2,000 seafood professionals have been provided important Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point training, critical to promoting food safety, thanks to the Sea Grant program.

Ramifications ‘big for Alaska’; Texas, too

But when asked by Undercurrent News to describe the specific benefits of the Sea Grant, those familiar with the program most often identified its support of more than 500 extension agents spread across coastal parts of the US. The agents range widely in experience, including oceanographers, college professors and former fishermen, and specialty areas, including fisheries management, invasive aquatic species, coastal engineering and water quality, Hurley said.

The Sea Grant program in Alaska supports 11 such agents who live and work in eight different coastal communities, said Paula Cullenberg, who heads up Sea Grant efforts at the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks.

“Those folks are working intensely on local issues from invasive species to the loss of sea ice in Nome and the implications to people when they are out subsistence hunting to the ability of a young person to get the financial support they need to get into fishing,” she told Undercurrent.

Alaska is a state that leans heavily on the support of the Sea Grant program. Its seafood industry accounts for more than 41,000 jobs and registers a $2.1bn per year economic impact on the state, second only to the oil and gas industry, according to a study funded by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. Seafood is the state’s largest foreign export.

“If the Sea Grant program were to go away, I think the ramifications are big for Alaska,” Cullenberg said. “We’ve been here for many years and I think we really are, in so many ways, the glue that helps the state move forward on so many issues.”

The Sea Grant program also helps to sponsor several professional courses aimed at improving the skills of fishermen in the state, especially those related to policy, financial management and other issues that don't involve a net or reel. One course that has been offered seven times addresses the graying of the Alaskan fleet, where the average age of a boat captain is now 50. Since 2007, the program has convened seven statewide Alaska Young Fishermen’s Summits, involving more than 100 volunteers as speakers and educating nearly 500 new fishery entrants. The most recent three-day gathering, held in January, attracted a record 85 participants, about half of whom were women.

Cullenberg is buoyed by her knowledge that all three of the Republican lawmakers who represent her state in Washington (senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and representative Don Young) have been supportive of the Sea Grant program in the past and hopeful that it will survive the next budget fight.

The Sea Grant is big for Texas, too, said Pamela Plotkin, head of the program at Texas A&M University.

Between 2014 and 2017, two of the Texas Sea Grant's 13 extension agents and specialists -- with the help of funds from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation -- trained 1,099 fishermen on how to use turtle excluder devices, a contraption that fits on nets to prevent unnecessary by-catch and protects the harvesters from violating federal laws. They inspected as many as 1,352 such devices, even finding one manufacturer that didn't satisfy the required specifications.

Plotkin said she has a hard time imagining harvesters working with a NOAA official in such a capacity. Extension agents live in the same communities as the fishermen and develop a "trust relationship" with them, she said.

"They are people who have the ability to effect change with fishermen that someone from an office in Silver Spring, Maryland, cannot," she said.

When Hurricane Harvey decimated Texas in August, it was the Sea Grant agents who performed rapid assessments of the damages done to multiple fisheries and also checked the needs of the commercial fishing industry. They led efforts to recover sunken vessels and partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide financial technical assistance to help local communities apply for disaster assistance.

Algae blooms and overfishing

Another expected casualty, should the Sea Grant program be wiped out, could be multiple species of fish and shellfish themselves, as the funding is a major source of research, helping to address such unexpected emergencies as toxic algae outbreaks and serving as a neutral party in helping to resolve concerns about overfishing.

Research accounts for at least 40% of the Sea Grant expenditures in each state, though some state programs, like the one in Wisconsin, spend closer to 50% of their money on it, Hurley said.

The University of Rhode Island, for example, used Sea Grant money to fund new studies and provide training to prevent the spread of bacteria following the algae blooms that closed down shellfishing parts of Narragansett Bay in late 2016, the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal reported. A cut in either the 2018 or 2019 budgets could prevent the university from advancing research on reducing lobster shell disease, the newspaper advised.

Under specific direction provided by Congress in 2016, the Sea Grant program has dedicated $5m of its funds to the University of Mississippi to assess the state of the red snapper population in the gulf, helping to impartially address what has become somewhat of a hot political topic.

“We are non-regulatory, we work well with fishermen and we are the honest brokers of science,” SGA’s Hurley said.

In October, the Sea Grant program announced that it would spend more than $6.6m to fund 11 projects across the US, including several dealing with offshore aquaculture. One project, being overseen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working to create a sensor that will more quickly detect the presence of deadly Vibrio bacteria in oysters and alert harvesters.

Without federal funds, progress on these efforts could come to a premature halt, as would the assistance provided to harvesters of oysters and other commercial species by Massachusetts’ 10 extension agents, Robert Vincent, assistant director of advisory services for the MIT Sea Grant program, told Undercurrent.