The Problem

America's ocean is in crisis, and the damage is no longer abstract. The waters that feed the country, guard its coasts, and support billions of dollars in jobs and food are being poisoned, emptied, and left to degrade, and the harm is already reaching people's health and livelihoods. As the climate crisis deepens, every part of it gets worse.

Millions of metric tons of plastic enter the world's oceans every year. Credible estimates run from roughly one to 12 million tons, and the range itself is a symptom of how little the world tracks where it all goes. Ghost gear, the lost and discarded fishing nets, traps, and lines, makes up 46 to 70 percent of all large floating plastic debris by weight and goes on killing for years after it is lost. The Gulf of Maine loses an estimated 175,000 lobster traps annually. Coral reefs are bleaching from Florida to Hawaii. Seagrass meadows are shrinking by 11,000 hectares a year. Mangrove forests, which protect coastlines from storms and store more carbon per acre than most forests on land, lost vast areas in the late twentieth century at rates of one to three percent per year. Conservation efforts have slowed the destruction, but the cumulative damage is severe and many degraded areas have never been restored. Mangroves, seagrasses, salt marshes, and kelp forests do a quiet but valuable job. They soak up carbon dioxide and bury it in the mud and their own tissue, which is why scientists call them "blue carbon" ecosystems. They are vanishing about twice as fast as forests on land, and when they go, the carbon they stored escapes back into the air, coastlines lose a natural storm buffer, and the young fish that grow up among them lose their nursery.

The Gulf of Mexico dead zone measured 6,705 square miles in August 2024, more than three times the EPA's target of 1,900 square miles. That dead zone is caused by agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River basin.

The harm is not limited to what floats on the surface. The chemistry of the water itself is changing. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, and as it absorbs more, the water becomes more acidic. That rising acidity is dissolving the shells and skeletons of the creatures at the base of the marine food chain, the corals, shellfish, and tiny plankton that everything larger depends on. These organisms build their bodies out of calcium carbonate, the same material as limestone, and acidifying water makes that harder and harder to do. The problem will worsen until atmospheric CO2 concentrations come down.

The fish themselves tell a more hopeful story, and a warning. American fisheries drive some $320 billion in economic activity a year and support more than two million jobs. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the federal law that governs fishing in U.S. waters and requires catch limits to be set by science, the country has rebuilt 50 depleted stocks since 2000 and pushed overfishing to record lows, proof that science-based limits work. But the job is unfinished. Dozens of stocks remain overfished, many more are too data-poor to assess at all, warming water is pushing fish into new ranges faster than management can follow, and the stock science and at-sea monitoring that honest catch limits depend on have been chronically underfunded.

The global framework for managing these crises is failing. Marine Protected Areas, the zones where fishing, mining, and other extraction are restricted, cover only about 10 percent of the world's oceans, and only about 3.3 percent are fully or highly protected, meaning no extraction of any kind. The international community pledged to protect 30 percent of global oceans by 2030, and that target is nowhere close to being met. The International Seabed Authority, the UN body responsible for setting rules for deep-sea mining in international waters, has stalled, with zero commercial mining contracts approved and the rulebook still under negotiation.

At the same time, the federal agencies that protect America's oceans are losing staff and freezing grants. Federal coastal restoration, the work of rebuilding eroded beaches and dunes, replanting salt marshes and seagrass beds, restoring oyster reefs, and hardening shorelines against storm surge, has long run on a patchwork of several hundred million dollars per year spread across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). It was already a fraction of what the country needs to protect its coasts from rising seas and more frequent storms.

The Mission

The Mission for America will transform the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone into the healthiest, best-monitored, and most economically productive large marine area on Earth. This is the ocean the United States controls, reaching 200 nautical miles out from every American coast and covering more water than the nation has land. The RFC and government partners will restore the living systems that feed hundreds of millions of people and protect coastlines from storms. In the process, we will create tens of thousands of high-wage jobs in coastal communities, build new industries around ocean restoration and coastal enterprise, and, by first setting our own waters right, earn the standing to lead the complex, multinational agreements that restoring the global ocean will ultimately require.

The first piece is cleaning. The Mission will clear 90 percent of the large floating plastic out of U.S. waters by 2039 and retrieve every piece of newly lost ghost gear. The advanced recycling industry that processes that recovered waste, breaking plastics chemically back down into raw material rather than just shredding and melting them, will be built domestically, employing tens of thousands of workers in recycling, manufacturing, and collection. The payoff is tangible. The nets and bottles pulled from the water come back as the feedstock for new goods instead of piling up in landfills. Getting the plastic out also cuts the microplastics that break off it and end up in the fish and shellfish Americans eat, the human-health thread the Toxins chapter develops further.

The second is restoring coastal ecosystems. Oyster reefs, mangroves, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, and kelp forests are the ocean's living infrastructure. They filter water, shelter fish, prevent billions of dollars in flood damage, and sequester carbon. Most of this infrastructure has been destroyed, and restoration works to bring it back. The Mission will treat coastal restoration as bankable infrastructure, the same way roads and power plants are financed, and deploy the RFC's direct loans to restoration operators, conservation districts, and tribal nations. Kelp farming will expand into a domestic industry that supplies soil amendments now and, as the market matures, feedstock for bioplastics. Aquaculture will produce affordable protein without depleting freshwater or arable land. And because the runoff that suffocates coastal waters starts inland, the Mission will pay farmers upstream to cut the fertilizer pollution that drives the Gulf dead zone, working through the Farming chapter. Coral reefs are the one ecosystem the Mission cannot promise to rebuild in a decade. They are dying from heat and acid faster than anyone can replant them, so here the work is to breed hardier strains, bank the living coral through each heat wave, and buy time until the decarbonization missions cool the water. The same acidifying water threatens the shellfish coast, so the Mission will arm growers with early warning and the tools to buffer against it, the defense that already saved the Pacific Northwest's oyster farms.

The third is mapping and governing the entire U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Roughly 44 percent of U.S. ocean waters remain unsurveyed to modern standards. Designating Marine Protected Areas, setting seafloor-mining rules, and tracking ecosystem health all depend on knowing what is down there, and on the agencies that govern the coast working together instead of at cross-purposes. On Day One a National Coastal Coordination Council will give them a shared table and a shared chart. The Mission will survey every square nautical mile of the EEZ and publish the data openly. Working from that survey, the nation will protect 30 percent of its waters as fully protected Marine Protected Areas by 2039, and will site offshore wind where the data says it belongs, clear of sensitive habitat and migratory routes. Enforcement will be funded directly, as the public good it is, while a mandate-driven restoration-credit market, modeled on America's existing wetland and endangered-species banks that require anyone who damages habitat to pay to rebuild it elsewhere, pulls private capital into restoring marine habitat. Deep-sea minerals in the EEZ will be studied, not mined. No commercial extraction will be allowed until rigorous, independent science can show it would not do irreversible harm, with NOAA leading that research.

The fourth is rebuilding the fisheries themselves. Cleaner water and protected habitat mean little if the fish are pulled out faster than they return. The Mission will fund the science that sets honest catch limits, end overfishing, set a hard date to rebuild each depleted stock, put modern monitoring on the water, and give fishers a fair transition, paying for buyouts and income support rather than lending it to them, so that American fishing lands more fish, from healthier stocks, at the end of the decade than at the start.

The RFC is the financing backbone. It will extend 30-year, low-interest loans to recycling facilities, restoration operators, and aquaculture farms, and it will lend directly through state agencies and community development lenders so local operators reach capital without waiting on federal approval. It will contract for the domestic manufacture of robotic ocean skimmers and monitoring systems, paying for results rather than promises, and it will build NOAA's comprehensive EEZ survey directly. The other tools fill in around that backbone. The Ocean Cleanup Fund, paid for by a fee on new plastic, covers the cleanup on the principle that the polluter pays. A national packaging-waste standard and federal purchasing create steady demand for the recovered plastic and the restored habitat. A Coastal Restoration Match Fund puts two federal dollars behind every dollar a state, tribe, or foundation raises. And ordinary federal grants carry the public work that no loan could ever pay back.

Solutions

Solution 1: Clean the Sea

Ghost gear is the worst of the plastic in the water. Lost fishing nets, traps, and longlines drift for years, entangling and killing marine life, and they make up 46 to 70 percent of all large floating debris by weight. In the Gulf of Maine alone, an estimated 175,000 lobster traps are lost every year, and across the U.S. fishing fleet no one even knows the total, because no one is required to count it.

An Ocean Cleanup Fund modeled on the abandoned-mine cleanup fund. The Mission will capitalize a dedicated Ocean Cleanup Fund that finances collection contracts and gear retrieval programs. The Fund's revenue comes from a per-ton fee on virgin plastic production, on the principle that companies introducing new plastic into the economy should pay to remove the old stuff from the ocean. The fee also closes the price gap between virgin and recycled material, making the new domestic recycling industry competitive against subsidized petrochemical feedstock for the first time. The federal Fund creates a uniform national revenue stream large enough to fund cleanup at the scale of the entire Exclusive Economic Zone. The fee is designed to work itself out of a job. As recycled and plant-based materials come online, the fee on new fossil plastic can ratchet up until making that plastic is no longer worth it, and by then the cleanup is carried by the producer-responsibility fees described below rather than by a material on its way out. Cleanup funding never depends on plastic production staying high.

The structural model is the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) and its Abandoned Mine Land program, a polluter-pays trust fund that has been reauthorized on a bipartisan basis for 50 years because money flows back to the affected communities. The same logic applies here. Revenue from the virgin plastic fee will be distributed as block grants to coastal states, tribal nations, and territorial governments on a formula that reflects coastline mileage, plastic loading in adjacent waters, and fishing-community economic exposure. Each grantee will administer its own cleanup contracts, gear retrieval cooperatives, and recycling partnerships within national protocols. Performance metrics covering tons of plastic recovered, ghost gear retrieved, recycling capacity built, and jobs created will determine the next cycle's allocation. Communities that take on the work will see the dollars, build the industry, and become the constituency that defends the program in every future Congress.

National EPR rules that capitalize the recycling buildout. The advanced recycling industry being built needs reliable feedstock and a national customer base. Seven states have enacted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws, rules that make producers financially responsible for the waste their packaging generates, and major compliance milestones are taking effect in 2026. Those state laws are driving a growing domestic advanced recycling market, but a 50-state patchwork is a compliance headache and leaves the rest of the country unprotected. Congress will establish a national EPR standard for packaging, replacing the patchwork with a single set of rules. Producers will pay into the same RFC-financed recycling network as the central compliance pathway, so participation builds the new industry's customer base rather than becoming a standalone regulatory burden.

Build the advanced recycling industry. The RFC will provide direct loans for the construction of advanced recycling facilities that can break down recovered marine plastic into raw material for new products. These facilities close the loop, taking plastic collected from the ocean, processing it domestically, and returning it to the manufacturing economy instead of a landfill. The RFC overcomes the capital barrier that keeps advanced recycling subscale, while the virgin plastic fee makes new plastic more expensive and the EPR standard makes producers pay for packaging waste, so the RFC finances the supply and the fee and EPR reshape the demand. Physically, an advanced recycling plant looks like a compact chemical works, with feedstock sorting and shredding at one end, reactors that cook or dissolve the plastic back into its building blocks in the middle, and clean raw material for manufacturers coming out the other end. They run best near where the plastic lands and where industry already sits, so the natural homes are port cities and the existing chemical corridors of the Gulf and the coasts, close to the collection fleets, rail, power, and a trained workforce.

A federal gear retrieval program for the fishing industry. The RFC will finance the fishing industry's own gear-retrieval fleets and lend directly to fishing communities for gear replacement and tracking technology, repaid over time, while the block-grant cooperatives funded by the Ocean Cleanup Fund handle community-wide cleanup. Gear-tracking technology for traps and nets exists, but it remains a real capital cost for working fishers, so RFC financing and cost-share are what make adoption feasible. Reporting lost gear will become a condition of every federal fishing permit, so any vessel that fishes federal waters must report the gear it loses, where, and what type, whether or not it takes a dollar of RFC financing. That single requirement closes the long-standing data gap the Problem describes, turning "how much gear is lost" from a guess into a national record that tells retrieval crews where to work. The reporting rule is the mandate, and the RFC financing and cost-share are what make meeting it easy rather than burdensome, putting tracking technology and retrieval within reach of working fishers instead of loading a new cost onto them.

Build the cleanup fleet. The RFC will issue pay-for-performance contracts for the development and domestic manufacturing of robotic ocean skimmers and autonomous collection systems. No deployment statistics exist for robotic ocean skimmers today, because the technology is early-stage. The pay-for-performance model is designed for exactly this situation, with multiple companies competing, the government paying for results, tons of plastic collected per month, not proposals, and underperformers replaced. These machines range from small solar-powered surface drones that skim floating debris into onboard bins, to larger uncrewed boats that tow collection booms, to fixed interceptors anchored at river mouths where much of the plastic first washes out to sea. They run on their own for days at a time, radioing their position and their haul back to shore.

The cleanup contracts themselves will go to private firms and nonprofits operating collection vessels and systems across the EEZ. A first-year national survey will measure how much large floating plastic sits in U.S. waters and how much enters each year, setting the baseline the target is measured against. Against that baseline, the target is 90 percent annual removal of large floating plastic from U.S. waters by 2039, combined with full retrieval of newly lost ghost gear each year.

What this delivers: A domestic advanced recycling industry scaled to process marine plastic. A mandatory gear reporting and retrieval system. A domestically manufactured fleet of cleanup technology. Tens of thousands of jobs in recycling, manufacturing, collection, and marine operations.

Solution 2: Rebuild the Living Coast

The ocean's living infrastructure provides services that no engineered substitute can match. Oyster reefs filter water and buffer coastlines from storms. Kelp forests shelter fish nurseries and absorb CO2. Mangroves prevent billions of dollars in flood damage every year. Coral reefs support fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Seagrass meadows stabilize sediments, store carbon, and provide critical habitats.

Most of this infrastructure has been destroyed or degraded by decades of pollution, overharvesting, and warming. But restoration works.

In the Chesapeake Bay, almost all of the rebuilt oyster reefs studied after six years were thriving. The transplanted oysters had survived, bred, and grown into real reefs that clean the water and shelter other sea life. The catch is money. Rebuilding a single hectare of oyster reef can cost anywhere from $150,000 to more than $400,000, and kelp forests and mangroves carry their own price tags. Today the federal government spends only a few hundred million dollars a year on all coastal restoration combined, a small fraction of what the coasts need.

Restoration as infrastructure investment. The RFC will treat rebuilding a coastline the way it treats building a road or a power plant, as real infrastructure worth financing, because storm protection, healthier fisheries, cleaner water, and stored carbon are real economic returns. Most of the lending will come straight from the RFC, and to reach the small operators and local outfits a federal lender would usually pass over, it will also work through state public banks and community lenders. The money pays for the supply side of restoration, the nurseries that raise young oysters and coral to transplanting size, the specialized boats, the monitoring gear, and the crews who do the work. The demand comes from government purchasing, as federal and state agencies contract for finished results, so many acres of oyster reef, so many miles of replanted seagrass. Those contracts, along with the restoration credits operators earn from the market described in Solution 3, give a 30-year restoration loan something steady to be repaid from.

A 2:1 federal match for state, tribal, and philanthropic dollars. Alongside the RFC's loan programs, the Mission will stand up a Coastal Restoration Match Fund that puts two federal dollars behind every one dollar raised by states, tribes, and philanthropic partners for qualifying restoration projects. The match is the fastest way to turn existing local momentum into national scale. The country already has willing restoration operators, conservation districts, and tribal nations with their own funds and political backing, and the match multiplies their reach overnight without displacing their leadership.

The current restoration model runs on competitive grants and philanthropic matching funds. These are not going away, and the RFC and the Match Fund complement them. But grant cycles are slow, politically vulnerable, and cannot sustain the scale needed. The RFC's advantage is speed and durability, 30-year loans that match the payback period of ecosystem investments, capitalized through an institution that survives changes in administration.

Drive down costs through scale. Oyster reef restoration at $150,000 to $400,000 per hectare is the price of doing it one project at a time. The same learning curve that drives down costs in manufacturing applies to restoration. Standardized nursery protocols, purpose-built deployment vessels, and trained crews working multiple sites all bring per-hectare costs down. The RFC will finance restoration at a scale that creates these efficiencies, the same way it finances factory construction.

The kelp economy. Kelp farming is the intersection of ecosystem restoration and industrial opportunity. Americans already buy billions of dollars of seaweed a year, almost all of it imported, and domestic farming is only a small, fast-growing fraction of that demand. Kelp grows fast, absorbs CO2, and requires no freshwater, fertilizer, or arable land. Its established value lies in food and hydrocolloid markets, and two growing industrial uses make it a restoration crop worth financing at scale:

• Bioplastic feedstock. Kelp-based bioplastics displace petroleum-derived materials. The Industry chapter creates the manufacturing demand.
• Soil amendments. Kelp-based soil amendments help crops take up nutrients, and the Farming chapter runs them through its nutrient-management programs.

The Mission will also finance the farming of Asparagopsis, a red seaweed whose oils have sharply cut the methane cattle belch in feedlot trials. This is a different plant from kelp, and a different kind of bet. It is not yet proven at commercial scale or cleared for sale by U.S. regulators, so the Mission treats it as a bet worth making rather than a sure thing. The RFC will fund production capacity and offer advance purchases to carry it across the gap, while the Farming chapter handles the agricultural rollout. None of the chapter's core targets depend on it.

The RFC will finance industrial-scale kelp farming operations along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, including nursery infrastructure, harvest equipment, and processing facilities. The chapter does not claim kelp farming as a proven way to pull carbon out of the air. It claims kelp farming as a proven industry with real products and real markets. If the science later shows kelp is also a serious carbon sink, that is a bonus.

Sustainable aquaculture expansion. U.S. aquaculture sells about $2 billion of fish and shellfish a year and contributes around $4 billion to the economy once processing and sales are counted, growing about four percent a year and still small next to the seafood the country imports. NOAA's Aquaculture Opportunity Areas program is identifying suitable sites for offshore fish and shellfish farming. Consumer demand for sustainable protein is driving growth, alongside advances in land-based recirculating systems, indoor facilities that raise fish in filtered, recycled water and keep the pollution of ocean fish farms out of the sea. The RFC will provide direct loans for aquaculture facility construction and for the small operators who struggle to access capital. Aquaculture at scale means protein production that does not require clearing forests, depleting freshwater, or acidifying soil.

Coral resilience through research. Coral is the hardest case in this chapter, and the Mission is honest about it. America's reefs, the Florida Reef Tract, the only barrier reef in the continental United States, along with the reefs of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, and the Flower Garden Banks, are dying faster than any restoration can rebuild them, because the water itself is now too warm and too acidic. No amount of transplanting outruns that. The real cure is cutting the carbon dioxide that heats and acidifies the ocean. What this chapter can do is buy time and keep the options open. The Manhattan Projects chapter's Advanced Research Division will coordinate frontier research in coral genetic resilience, breeding and selecting heat-tolerant strains. The RFC will finance the deployment of what that research produces, growing hardier coral in nurseries and transplanting it onto degraded reefs, and, when a marine heat wave hits, rescuing living coral into gene banks and land-based tanks the way Florida did in 2023, so the genetic stock survives to reseed reefs later. The Mission promises measured survival, not restored reefs.

Defend the shellfish coast against acidification. Open-ocean acidification is driven by the carbon dioxide in the air, and the only true cure is to stop emitting it, the work of the rest of the Mission for America. But the country does not have to wait helplessly. When corrosive, low-pH water welled up along the Oregon coast between 2006 and 2008, it killed as much as 80 percent of the oyster larvae at hatcheries like Whiskey Creek on Netarts Bay and nearly took down Washington's shellfish industry, a $270-million-a-year business that supports thousands of jobs across the Pacific Northwest. Growers saved it by adapting. They monitored the chemistry of the incoming water, timed their intake to the hours when photosynthesis had drawn the acid down, buffered the water in their tanks, and bred tougher oysters to spawn from. The Mission will make those defenses standard and national. The EEZ monitoring network will feed real-time water-chemistry data to every shellfish hatchery and grower, an early-warning system that flags corrosive water a day or two before it arrives, and the RFC will finance the intake treatment, buffering equipment, and selective-breeding programs that let operations ride it out. The nutrient cuts and the kelp and seagrass beds this chapter already funds do double duty here, because by pulling carbon out of the water locally they ease coastal acidification and give shellfish and coral pockets of more breathable water.

Choke off the nutrient runoff that kills coastal waters. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone, 6,705 square miles in August 2024, is caused by agricultural runoff from the Mississippi basin. Restoring coastal ecosystems without cutting the runoff that suffocates them treats the symptom, not the cause. The Oceans chapter coordinates with the Farming chapter on a Mississippi-basin nutrient reduction program that pays for cover cropping, precision fertilization, and wetland buffer restoration across the upstream watersheds that feed the Gulf. The same approach applies to the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound, and other coastal dead zones fed by inland agriculture. Where possible, restoration protocols will be validated through controlled trials, testing different nursery designs, deployment methods, and watershed interventions against each other, so the country learns what actually works.

A cautious line on ocean carbon removal. Using the ocean to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, by fertilizing plankton, altering seawater chemistry, or sinking seaweed, is a research question first, not something to deploy at scale on hope. The rule here is to get the science before scaling. The Manhattan Projects and Cooldown chapters fund that research, and the Oceans mission will only finance the commercial deployment of an ocean carbon-removal method once the measurement, verification, and ecosystem-impact science is settled.

What this delivers: Coastal ecosystem restoration at a scale that reverses the trend of loss. A kelp farming industry supplying bioplastic feedstock and soil amendments. Expanded sustainable aquaculture. A shellfish coast defended against acidification. Tens of thousands of jobs in restoration, farming, and marine operations, concentrated in coastal communities that need them most.

Solution 3: Map and Govern the EEZ

The Exclusive Economic Zone contains extraordinary biodiversity, critical mineral deposits, and vast areas that no human has ever surveyed. As of 2025, roughly 44 percent of U.S. ocean and coastal waters remain unmapped to modern standards. The federal government's own mapping strategy, published in 2020, set a goal of mapping all deep waters by 2030 and all nearshore waters by 2040. At the current pace, with NOAA's ocean exploration budget at roughly $46 million per year, neither target will be met. Before the country can designate new Marine Protected Areas, set rules for seafloor mining, or monitor the health of its marine ecosystems, it needs a comprehensive picture of what is actually down there.

Coastal authority is also fractured. Restoration sits in one corner of NOAA, marine protected area siting in another, offshore wind permitting at Interior, fisheries management at the regional councils, and dredging and shoreline work at the Army Corps, with coastal states and tribes holding their own jurisdictions over much of the same water. Decisions get made in parallel, often in conflict, and almost never on a shared map. The country had a coordinating body for exactly this kind of problem, the Water Resources Council and its River Basin Commissions, and it was defunded in 1981.

Stand up a National Coastal Coordination Council on Day One. The President will issue an executive order on Day One re-establishing a coordinating body for coastal and ocean governance, modeled on the Water Resources Council and its regional commissions. The National Coastal Coordination Council will sit in the Executive Office of the President and bring together NOAA, Interior, the Army Corps, EPA, the Coast Guard, the regional fishery management councils, coastal-state governors, and tribal nations. Underneath it, regional ocean councils covering the Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, Alaska, Pacific Islands, and Caribbean will handle the actual coordination of restoration siting, MPA designation, offshore wind layout, dredge spoil, and fisheries management within each ocean basin. The Council does not replace existing agencies. It gives them one table to sit at and one place where conflicts get settled before they end up in court. Congress will authorize and fund the Council in the first legislative package, following the abandoned-mine-cleanup model, so it is durable and bipartisan and sends money to the regions doing the work.

Map the entire EEZ. NOAA will run a full habitat survey of the EEZ, charting not just the shape of the seafloor but the living communities, the seabed material, and the water chemistry that decide what lives where. The RFC will finance this as a direct build. The United Kingdom spends approximately £103 million (about $130 million) per year on seabed mapping and has documented a return of £86 in economic value for every pound invested, from better navigation charts, smarter offshore energy siting, more productive fisheries, and more effective conservation.

The technology to do this fast already exists. Autonomous survey vessels, uncrewed ships carrying sonar systems, can map vast areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional crewed research ships. In 2025, a single autonomous vessel mapped the entire Cayman Islands EEZ, 90,000 square kilometers, in roughly 300 mission days. A fleet of 15 to 20 similar vehicles, supplemented by underwater drones for high-priority habitat areas, could complete the remaining U.S. survey in five to seven years rather than decades. The RFC will finance the procurement of this autonomous fleet through pay-for-performance contracts, alongside upgrades to NOAA's existing research vessels. Full coverage means charting the depth and shape of the seafloor, the material it is made of, whether rock, sand, or mud, and the chemistry of the water, everywhere, with the detailed cataloging of marine life done first in the most important habitats and phased across the rest as the fleet grows.

The data will be published openly and freely, serving as the foundation for every governance, conservation, and extraction decision that follows. The mapping program will identify sensitive ecosystems, catalog species distributions, locate mineral deposits, and provide the baseline that makes everything else in this solution possible. The live feeds, seafloor sonar, habitat surveys, sea surface temperature, acidity, salinity, and current patterns, will flow into the Planetary Dashboard described in the Cooldown chapter, extending that same constellation of satellites, buoys, and sensors underwater and along the coast. What the Dashboard does for the atmosphere, the EEZ monitoring network does for the ocean.

Protect 30 percent of the EEZ. The Mission will designate 30 percent of U.S. coastal and EEZ waters as fully protected Marine Protected Areas by 2039. The 30-by-30 framework is the internationally recognized target, and as of 2026 the world is failing to meet it. The United States will lead by example within its own waters.

MPA designation will be informed by the mapping program and guided by ecological science, not political convenience. Protected areas will be linked by migratory blue corridors that follow the routes traveled by whales, sea turtles, tuna, and other species that move across vast distances.

Fund enforcement directly, and build a mandate-driven market for restoration. Enforcement is the weakest link in ocean conservation everywhere, and it is a job for the public to pay for, not a market. The Mission will fund Coast Guard patrols, satellite surveillance, and the monitoring network directly out of the federal budget, so protection does not rise and fall with the price of a credit. A protected coast is not something the country should have to sell credits to afford.

America already runs the largest restoration market on Earth. For 50 years, anyone who destroys a wetland under the Clean Water Act, or an endangered species' habitat under the Endangered Species Act, has been required to pay to restore an equivalent one somewhere else, through mitigation and conservation banks. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it works because the law creates the demand. Every purely voluntary version tried abroad, from Australia's national scheme to the international credit market, has stalled for want of buyers. The Mission will extend that proven model to the sea. Any activity that disturbs habitat in the EEZ, from offshore wind foundations and dredging to port expansion, cable-laying, and permitted seabed pilots, will have to offset the damage by buying certified marine restoration credits, on the same offset-multiplier principle applied to seabed mining below. The requirement creates the demand, and the demand pulls private capital into oyster reef, seagrass, and kelp restoration alongside the RFC's loans.

The roles are kept separate to head off the obvious conflict of interest. NOAA sets the biodiversity metric and certifies credits against it. An independent public registry publishes every credit and every transaction openly and claws credits back when monitoring shows a restoration has failed to deliver. The RFC finances the restoration operators who supply the credits, and stands ready as a buyer of last resort to hold a floor under the market, but it does not grade its own borrowers' work. Because marine restoration is harder to measure than a wetland on land, the metric will be tested before the market scales up, with directly funded enforcement carrying the early years while the credit market grows into its role as the measurement science matures.

Support fishing communities through the transition. New MPAs will close some waters to fishing. But protection is about abundance. Well-managed protected areas grow healthier ecosystems that spill fish and shellfish into the waters around them, improving nearby catches. The Mission is not taking fishing away from communities but rebuilding the marine ecosystems that sustain fishing over the long term. Where a closure displaces fishing, fishers get the fair transition detailed in Solution 4, grant-funded payments and voluntary buyouts rather than just loans, along with help reaching the waters where stocks are healthiest. Tribal fishing rights and sovereignty will be respected in all MPA designations, and no protected area will override treaty-protected access without the consent of the affected nation.

Site offshore wind using the map. Floating offshore wind arrays, sited 30 to 60 kilometers off the coast, are among the largest clean-power resources the country has left to build. The Clean Power chapter details the generation buildout, and the Oceans chapter governs the siting. The same EEZ survey that informs MPA designation and seafloor extraction decisions determines where wind arrays belong, outside sensitive habitats, clear of migratory blue corridors, and in coordination with fishing communities whose waters they will share. Done well, offshore wind becomes part of the living-coast economy rather than a competitor to it.

Study the seafloor before mining it. The ocean floor within the U.S. EEZ contains deposits of manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, and other minerals essential to the clean energy transition, much of it locked in polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized metal lumps scattered across the deep seafloor. It also contains ecosystems that are among the least understood on Earth, and early commercial-scale mining tests have shown serious damage, a 37 percent reduction in seafloor organisms two months after disturbance in one nodule-mining test, that may take decades or centuries to recover. More than 40 nations have called for a moratorium. The United States cannot rush into the seabed, and it also cannot cede the rulebook to an International Seabed Authority that has stalled for years.

The Mission will halt commercial deep-sea mining in the U.S. EEZ and keep it halted until the research is done. There will be no commercial extraction until rigorous, independent science can show it can happen without lasting harm. NOAA will conduct the biological surveys, high-resolution seafloor maps, and ecosystem-impact studies that the world does not yet have. Small pilots, under one square kilometer per test site, will be allowed under strict monitoring, with every finding made public.

If commercial mining is ultimately permitted, the regulatory framework will carry strict environmental standards, comprehensive prior mapping, an offset multiplier requiring protection of a multiplied area of equivalent habitat for every unit disturbed, and real-time monitoring with automatic suspension triggers if measured impacts exceed predicted levels. The United States is not racing to mine the seabed. It is setting the standard for whether, and how, anyone should.

What this delivers: The first comprehensive map of the U.S. EEZ. Thirty percent of U.S. waters fully protected and enforced. Enforcement funded directly as the public good it is, with a mandate-driven restoration-credit market crowding private capital into habitat recovery. A deep-sea mining moratorium that keeps a potentially enormous mineral resource in reserve and off-limits until the science says whether it can ever be taken without irreversible damage. A governance model that other nations can adopt.

Solution 4: Rebuild the Fisheries

American fisheries are already one of the country's great renewable industries, a harvest that replenishes itself every year as long as it is not overfished, and one of the clearest proofs that public management works. Science-based catch limits rebuilt 50 stocks since 2000 and drove overfishing to record lows. But the work is half-finished, and climate change is moving the target. This solution finishes the job. It funds the science, puts monitoring on the water, ends overfishing for good, and carries fishers through the change instead of handing them the bill.

Fund the science that sets the limits. Honest catch limits require honest stock assessments, and too many stocks are assessed rarely or not at all. NOAA, financed by the RFC, will modernize and fully fund the national stock-assessment program, feeding it real-time data from the EEZ mapping and monitoring network built in Solution 3, closing the data gap on data-poor stocks, and building the models to track fish as warming water shifts them into new ranges. The Workforce chapter trains the stock-assessment scientists and at-sea monitors this requires.

Put monitoring on the water. Rules mean nothing without eyes on the catch. The Mission will finance electronic monitoring, cameras and sensors on vessels, and human observer coverage, with the RFC and cost-share carrying the cost so accountability does not land as a new bill on small boats. The same monitoring cuts bycatch, the untargeted fish, turtles, and marine mammals killed in gear, and works alongside the gear-tracking program in Solution 1.

End overfishing and rebuild every depleted stock on a deadline. Every federally managed stock will fish within science-based limits, and every overfished stock will carry a rebuilding plan with a hard date, on the model that already returned 50 stocks to health. The payoff is straightforward. A rebuilt stock yields more fish year after year, so the industry grows by catching a little less now and a lot more later.

A fair transition for fishers. Where catch limits or new protected areas shrink how much can be caught, the Mission will not hand fishers the bill. It will offer grant-funded payments and voluntary permit and vessel buyouts to right-size overcapitalized fleets, the same buyback tool that retired 90 boats from the Pacific groundfish fleet and left the survivors more profitable, but paid for publicly this time rather than repaid by the fishers themselves over 30 years, alongside RFC loans for those who modernize and stay. The buyouts are voluntary and paid, aimed at leaving a smaller fleet catching healthier stocks at a profit.

Back the small boats. Federal money will favor owner-operators and community fisheries over consolidation into a few large holders, with permit banks that keep access in the hands of working fishing communities. A rebuilt fishery should belong to the people who fish it, not become another asset class.

Push illegal fishing out of American waters. The mapped, monitored EEZ is also an enforcement asset. The Coast Guard and the monitoring network will detect and interdict illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in U.S. waters, and expanded seafood-import monitoring will keep illegally caught fish from undercutting American fishers at the dock, in step with the Foreign Policy chapter's oceans work.

What this delivers: Overfishing ended and every depleted stock rebuilt or on a firm timeline. Catch limits grounded in modern, near-real-time science. Monitored, accountable fisheries with less bycatch. A paid, voluntary transition that right-sizes fleets without bankrupting fishers. Illegal fishing pushed out of U.S. waters. An American fishing industry that lands more, from healthier stocks, decade over decade.

Presidential Leadership

The president will treat the ocean as what it is, America's largest territory and a public inheritance worth more than 500 billion dollars a year in fishing and coastal business, the one part of the country that has been left to fall apart out of sight. The president will name the failure plainly. Corporations pour plastic into the water and pay nothing to pull it back out. Mining companies want to strip a seafloor no one has even mapped. Fishing towns are held hostage by an environmental collapse they did not cause and cannot fix on their own. And the agencies meant to hold the line have been starved and sidelined. The president's task is to end all four, and to prove that a government that let its own waters degrade can be made to restore them.

During the Campaign

The candidate makes it vivid and concrete. The candidate will promise the American public the cleanest, best-mapped, and most productive ocean on Earth, and will spell it out in first-term promises anyone can picture. The companies that make the plastic will start paying to clean it up. The first great marine monuments will be proclaimed. No one will be allowed to mine the deep seafloor on a guess. And the buybacks and rebuilding plans will start bringing the fishing communities back. All of it is the down payment on a 10-year destination of a third of American waters protected and the fisheries restored. The candidate will also go to the water in person, standing on a working fishing boat, walking through a shellfish hatchery that acidification nearly killed, and diving first a bleaching reef and then a restored oyster reef, showing the country what is being lost and naming the year each place will turn around.

Long-lead groundwork. Because the mapping and coordination take time to stand up, the groundwork starts during the campaign. Volunteer ocean engineers, private survey firms, fishermen's cooperatives, shellfish growers, and coastal-state officials will pre-identify the priority survey areas, the first marine-monument candidates, and the first cleanup, restoration, and hatchery sites, so NOAA and the RFC can move the day the new administration is cleared to act. Private survey companies are already mapping seabed on their own, and the campaign will point to their work as a live preview of what a national effort will do.

The Transition

Name the people. The president-elect will pick an activist NOAA Administrator with a mandate to rebuild the agency and reopen the grants and enforcement that were frozen. The RFC's ocean team will be led by someone who has actually built a marine restoration or fishing business, not a Washington lifer. The Interior Secretary will be ready to withdraw the seafloor from mining on Day One, and the Coast Guard will get a commandant who intends to make enforcement real.

Settle the first moves. The team will choose the first survey priority areas, the first marine national monuments, drawn from the under-protected continental-shelf and coastal waters since the remote Pacific is already largely protected, the first cleanup and restoration sites, the shellfish regions for the acidification-defense rollout, and the priority fisheries for the transition fund and the first voluntary buybacks.

Lock the tools with the RFC. With the RFC, the team will set the loan terms, the Ocean Cleanup Fund design, the marine restoration-credit metric and the offset-purchase rule that gives it demand, the fishery transition fund and buyback terms, and the pay-for-performance contracts for the mapping and cleanup fleets.

Draft the legislation. Counsel will write the opening legislative package during the transition so it is ready to be signed, not merely proposed. It will authorize the RFC's ocean financing, create the Ocean Cleanup Fund and the fee on new plastic that pays for it, set the national packaging-waste standard, fund the Coordination Council and the 2:1 Match Fund, write the marine restoration-credit market into law, modernize the Magnuson-Stevens Act and fund the fishery transition, and lock the protected areas and the mining moratorium into statute so a later administration cannot quietly undo them.

Day One

The president will establish the National Coastal Coordination Council and its regional ocean councils by executive order, and direct NOAA to launch the EEZ mapping program, stand up the acidification early-warning network, and reopen the frozen conservation grants and enforcement. Using the Antiquities Act, the president will proclaim the first marine national monuments over the under-protected continental-shelf waters, drawn around the canyon and seamount habitats, coldwater corals, and spawning and migratory grounds that warrant protection, the fastest lawful step toward the 30-percent goal and one component of the protected-area network Congress will codify. Using the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the president will withdraw the U.S. seafloor from commercial mineral leasing and direct NOAA to run the research that a real decision will require. The president will direct the RFC to open ocean applications and stand up its mission team under existing authority, announcing the first commitments with named sites, dollars, and dates, the first recycling plants, the first restoration operators, the first mapping vessels, and the first hatcheries to be fitted against acidification. A procurement order will direct federal buyers toward recovered-plastic content, and a directive will make lost-gear reporting a condition of every federal fishing permit. To a country used to watching its ocean decline, the first named places, committed dollars, and dates on Day One are the proof that this time is different.

The First 100 Days

The legislation drafted during the transition will reach Congress, and the president will work the votes in person. The package carries everything at once, the RFC's ocean financing line, the Ocean Cleanup Fund and its fee on new plastic, the national packaging-waste standard, the Coordination Council and the 2:1 Match Fund, the restoration-credit market, a modernized Magnuson-Stevens Act with money for the fishery transition, and the protected-area network and mining moratorium written into law so that a marine monument cannot be quietly reopened the way the Northeast Canyons monument was. The president will name the fights out loud. The plastics and petrochemical industry will spend heavily against the fee and the packaging standard, and that is the hardest fight in the chapter. The deep-sea mining companies will fight the moratorium. And where commercial fishing resists new protected areas, the answer is the fair transition and the rebuilt stocks the Mission puts on the table, with confrontation saved for the holdouts. Members of Congress who block the Mission will find the president campaigning in their districts to replace them.

Running the Mission, Years 1–10

Every stretch of water protected, every oyster reef rebuilt, every fish stock brought back from the brink, every beach cleared of plastic will get the president's public attention, and the case for a working ocean will be made fresh each time. The president will hold the line on the plastic fee, the packaging standard, and the restored protections against the industries that want them gone, and will fight in the open whenever a member of Congress or a coastal interest moves to stall a fix. Day to day, the RFC's mission team runs the financing and the long build, NOAA runs the science and the survey and the stock assessments, the Coast Guard enforces the protected areas and pushes out illegal fishing, and the Coordination Council settles the conflicts that used to end in court. By 2039 the country will have made its own waters the healthiest, best-monitored, and most productive large marine area on Earth.

What the 10-Year Mission Delivers

The ocean mission is not one mega-project but a decade of steady investment, on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year. That is roughly 10 times what the country now spends on ocean science, fisheries, and coastal management, and still well below the cost of rebuilding the power grid. Most of the money comes back. The industries that earn revenue, advanced recycling, kelp and aquaculture, and the supply side of restoration, are financed by RFC loans they repay out of what they sell or the contracts and credits they earn. The plastic cleanup pays for itself through the fee on new plastic, and the Match Fund and the restoration-credit market pull in state, tribal, philanthropic, and private dollars. What the public pays for outright is the backbone that no loan could ever repay, surveying the whole EEZ, running the monitoring and early-warning network, enforcing the protected areas, funding the stock science behind honest catch limits, and carrying fishers through the change. The country buys those the way it buys roads and coastal defense, because a mapped, protected, productive ocean is worth more than it costs. A full 10-year cost estimate will accompany the legislation.

Foundations by Year 1 (2030)

• NOAA EEZ mapping program launched, first priority areas (known mineral deposits, proposed MPA sites) under survey
• National Coastal Coordination Council established by executive order; regional ocean councils standing up
• RFC direct loan programs chartered and open for advanced recycling, coastal restoration, and kelp farming, with first capital committed
• First advanced recycling facilities financed by RFC loans and breaking ground, with state EPR fees providing demand
• Ocean Cleanup Fund capitalized through the virgin-plastic fee; national EPR standard enacted
• National plastic-loading baseline survey completed, setting the measured total the 90 percent removal target is defined against
• Lost-gear reporting required as a condition of every federal fishing permit; first retrieval programs standing up in priority fisheries (New England, Gulf, Pacific Northwest)
• Pay-for-performance contracts awarded for robotic skimmer prototypes; first domestic manufacturing facilities under development
• Coastal restoration lending established through state agencies and community lenders, with the first wave of projects funded
• Kelp farming loans closed and first new operations breaking ground along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts
• MPA designation process launched using NOAA mapping data; first new fully protected areas established
• First offshore wind lease areas screened against the mapping data for habitat and migratory-corridor conflicts through the regional ocean councils
• First marine monitoring buoys deployed in priority areas; data beginning to flow to Cooldown's Planetary Dashboard
• Ocean-acidification early-warning network stood up; first Pacific Northwest shellfish hatcheries fitted with RFC-financed intake buffering
• First MPAs enforced with directly funded patrols and satellite monitoring; NOAA marine restoration-credit metric in pilot and the offset-purchase requirement drafted for EEZ impact permits
• Stock-assessment modernization funded and underway, data-poor stocks first; fishery transition fund stood up with the first voluntary buyouts and income-support payments; electronic-monitoring rollout beginning in priority fisheries
• Workforce training programs launched at coastal community colleges and technical schools

Scale Up by Year 5 (2034)

• EEZ habitat survey 50%+ complete; detailed habitat data publicly available for surveyed areas
• Advanced recycling industry processing recovered marine plastic at commercial scale; feedstock constraints easing
• Robotic skimmer fleet in production; first units deployed across priority cleanup zones
• Ghost-gear retrieval programs operating across priority fisheries on both coasts and the Gulf
• Coastal restoration spending at $2 billion or more per year through combined RFC, federal, state, and philanthropic funding
• Mississippi-basin nutrient reduction program underway with the Farming chapter; Gulf dead zone trending toward the EPA target
• Oyster reef restoration costs declining as standardized nursery and deployment methods reach scale
• Heat-tolerant coral strains in nursery production; first pilot transplants onto degraded reefs in Florida and Hawaii under survival monitoring; coral gene-banking capacity in place for marine heat-wave rescue
• Kelp farming industry at first industrial-scale harvest and processing, supplying bioplastic feedstock and soil amendments to domestic markets; Asparagopsis production piloted as a livestock methane additive pending commercial validation
• 15%+ of U.S. EEZ designated as fully protected MPAs, enforced by directly funded patrols and monitoring; offset-purchase requirement in force and the marine restoration-credit market operating
• Migratory blue corridors established linking MPAs along Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf migration routes
• New offshore wind lease areas sited through the regional ocean councils on the EEZ map, clear of sensitive habitat and blue corridors
• NOAA deep-sea research program operational; commercial mining on hold until the science is in
• Marine monitoring network at initial operating capability across priority regions
• Aquaculture expansion underway in NOAA Opportunity Areas
• Ocean-acidification early-warning data flowing to shellfish hatcheries and growers coastwide; RFC-financed intake buffering and resistant-oyster breeding programs operating in the Pacific Northwest and expanding to other shellfish regions
• Overfishing ended on all but a handful of federally managed stocks, with rebuilding plans on deadline for those still depleted; electronic monitoring across the major fleets; illegal-fishing detection integrated into the monitoring network

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• Comprehensive EEZ map complete: every square nautical mile surveyed, data openly published
• 90% of large floating plastic removed annually from U.S. waters; ghost gear retrieval at full scale
• Domestic advanced recycling industry self-sustaining, processing marine and land-sourced plastic
• Coastal ecosystems in net recovery: loss rates reversed across oyster reefs, kelp forests, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows
• Coral held, not yet recovered: heat-tolerant strains deployed and monitored at reefs across Florida, Hawaii, and the territories, and the genetic stock secured in gene banks, while the deeper fix waits on falling ocean temperatures
• Kelp farming industry at industrial scale, integrated into bioplastics and agricultural supply chains
• Sustainable aquaculture expanded significantly, producing affordable protein without depleting freshwater or arable land
• Acidification early-warning and intake-buffering operating coastwide across shellfish regions: the shellfish coast defended
• Overfishing ended and depleted stocks rebuilt or on firm rebuilding trajectories; catch limits set by modern, near-real-time science; American fisheries landing more from healthier stocks than at the Mission's start
• 30% of U.S. EEZ fully protected and enforced through direct public funding; mandate-driven restoration-credit market channeling private capital into habitat recovery at scale
• Deep-sea mining decision reached on the basis of years of open scientific study; any commercial framework carries the strictest environmental standards in the world
• Marine monitoring network fully operational, feeding real-time data to the Planetary Dashboard
• 115,000+ new workers employed across the ocean economy
• U.S. EEZ governance model published as an open framework, with the United States convening international partners on ocean mapping, MPA, and seabed-mining standards
• The U.S. EEZ is the healthiest, best-monitored, and most economically productive large marine area on Earth