Seven months after the grace period ran out, the agency that bans seafood imports is asking whether the ban should be the first move

Approximately 2,500 fisheries, from 135 harvesting nations, in one round of decisions.

That is the workload the National Marine Fisheries Service describes in an advance notice filed on Tuesday, and it is the reason the notice exists. On September 2, 2025 the agency issued its first full set of comparability findings under the import provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Counting the extensions it granted along the way, the review took more than three years. Those findings are supposed to be repeated every four years, alongside progress reports from each nation on a four-year cycle of their own, and NMFS now says processing that volume consistently across thousands of fisheries under restrictive timelines is a high administrative burden for the agency and for the nations it evaluates.

So it has opened the regulations back up, before proposing anything, with sixteen questions and a sixty-day clock.

The statutory command behind all of this is short. Section 1371(a)(2) requires the United States to ban imports of commercial fish or fish products caught with technology that kills or seriously injures marine mammals in excess of United States standards. The 2016 rule turned that into a machine: a List of Foreign Fisheries, a comparability finding for each fishery on it, an import prohibition where the finding is denied, and a Certification of Admissibility to sort allowable product from prohibited product at entry. An exemption period gave harvesting nations time to build their programmes. It was extended three times and ended on December 31, 2025.

The notice is candid about where the machine grinds. Comparability is defined as comparable in effectiveness to the United States programme, and that programme is itself built on triage: stocks are designated strategic, fisheries are placed in categories by how often they kill marine mammals, and take reduction plans are written iteratively for the ones that matter most. The regulatory conditions the agency applies to foreign fisheries do not reflect that prioritisation. NMFS puts the result plainly, calling it an immense analytical hurdle to define what counts as comparable across thousands of fisheries under wholly different systems of government.

Enforcement has its own problem, and it is a customs problem. When a finding is denied, NMFS has to convert the denial into a prohibition by matching products to Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes, and those codes exist to classify trade, not to trace a fillet back to the fishery that caught it. Product is landed, processed and re-exported through intermediary nations. The agency says traceability is particularly hard for highly processed goods, and names fish oil and fish sauce, and acknowledges the 2016 rule already allows for cases where a product simply cannot be linked to a prohibited fishery.

Three of the sixteen questions are the ones importers will read first.

Question 7 asks whether, rather than imposing an immediate import prohibition, NMFS should be able to issue a conditional comparability finding against a nation's commitments, with a discretionary consultation period to fix the problem. Question 8 asks whether whole categories of fishery should be excluded up front, by gear type or by likelihood of harm, as having de minimis impact. Question 11 asks whether potential economic impacts, on the trade community, on small entities and on harvesting nations, should inform the findings.

The others cover the definition of United States standards, the four-year cycles, the intermediary nation certification, how the agency should handle incomplete data, how the Certification of Admissibility process could be changed, and which technical areas are the highest priority for capacity building.

Nothing is being changed yet. This is an advance notice, determined significant under Executive Order 12866, dated July 24 and signed by Samuel D. Rauch III. The rules in force are the ones written in 2016, and they stay in force until a proposed rule and a final rule say otherwise.