Let’s not mince words: the last eighteen months have been an absolute nightmare for federal ocean and conservation policy. Landmark environmental protections have been rolled back or severely hobbled, while agency budgets were slashed more than Janet Leigh when Norman Bates was in a particularly stabby mood.
But looking towards the 2026 midterm elections, the political weather vane is spinning.
If the projections hold, and Capitol Hill flips back to a Democratic majority this November, conservation NGOs and academic scientists cannot afford to spend November 4th nursing a celebratory hangover. The incoming Congress must hit the ground running with an aggressive oversight and legislative agenda. If you want your science, your sanctuary, or your species recovery plan to be on that agenda, your six-month countdown clock starts right now. It’s time to prepare.
Here is your tactical, no-nonsense guide to getting the US conservation agenda back on track:
1. Build your “Day One” legislative bundles
When a new Congress takes power, staff members are utterly drowned in work. They do not have time to turn your 40-page white paper on benthic disturbance into a bill. You need to do the heavy lifting for them. Start writing draft bills now.
- Draft the text. Convert your core conservation goals into ready-to-print legislative text or concrete policy riders.
- Write the one-pagers. If a congressional staffer cannot understand your ask in the time it takes to drink an espresso, it goes in the recycling bin.
- Reversing the directives. Identify the specific Trump administration executive orders or agency directives that did the most damage and provide the exact mechanism needed to repeal them.
2. Prepare for oversight hearings
A Democratic Congress loves nothing more than an investigative hearing to highlight the previous administration’s missteps. Committees like House Natural Resources will be hungry for data about Trump Administration missteps and failures – but it has to be bulletproof.
- Quantify the damage. Do not just say “habitats were harmed.” Document exactly how many acres of critical habitat lost protections, or how many consultation timelines were skipped.
Audit the agencies. Gather evidence of where scientific integrity policies were violated, where career scientists were silenced, or where data were scrubbed from public view.
Prepare your witnesses. Identify the articulate, media-savvy researchers within your networks who can stand up to aggressive cross-examination without blinking.
3. Reframe conservation as economic restoration
If NGOs and scientists go to a newly flipped Congress, talking purely about intrinsic ecological value, you are going to get outmaneuvered by corporate lobbyists. The defense of the ocean must be framed through the lens of economic resilience and blue-collar survival.
- Talk about jobs. Tie habitat restoration directly to coastal engineering jobs, tourism revenue, and commercial fisheries infrastructure.
- Energy savings. Highlight the billions spent to stop cheap offshore wind and solar projects and kill EV subsidies, and prop up a terminal coal- and oil-based energy industry. How much will Joe and Joanna Public save on their energy or car bills with renewable energy and electric vehicles?
- Target the money. Frame the fixing of the “Trump mess” as a way to protect taxpayer dollars from being wasted on poorly planned, Trump Administration boondoggles and handouts to corporate donors.
4. Restore conservation agencies
The unsung heroes of the last two years are the career scientists and program managers at NOAA, BOEM, and the EPA who kept their heads down and did the work despite political headwinds. They are tired, they are stressed, but they are still there. But offices sit empty and vital conservation work has been piling up.
- Open the lines of communication. Reach out to your agency contacts now. Not to ask for favors, but to ask what support they need from the academic and NGO community to resume normal operations.
- Advocate for new/re-hired positions. Hand Congress a pre-audited list of critical vacancies within FWS, NOAA, EPA, and BOEM, explicitly demonstrating how these empty seats have stalled specific conservation projects and delayed economic permits. Frame the rehiring of career scientists and enforcement officers not as bureaucratic expansion, but as a necessary return to basic government efficiency, public safety, and fiscal accountability.
- Prepare the science. Be ready to feed high-quality, peer-reviewed data into the regulatory pipelines the moment the political blockade lifts. Have scientific arguments against problematic rulings ready. Have proposals for species to list and Critical Habitat to designate ready.
5. Show me the money
The power of the purse is the fastest way to starve a bad policy and feed a starved agency. A flipped Congress can use the budget to quietly reverse damage long before major environmental bills ever clear a filibuster.
- Target the riders. Draft specific “limitation riders” for the next budget cycle that explicitly forbid agencies from spending federal funds to implement or enforce the Trump administration’s most damaging environmental directives.
- Draft “plus-up” requests. Do not just ask for “more money.” Give friendly appropriators exact, audited dollar figures needed to rebuild hollowed-out scientific branches at FWS, NOAA, EPA, and BOEM.
- Map out the grant backlogs. Identify key federal conservation grant programs that were frozen, delayed, or ideologically filtered over the last two years, and hand Congress a ready-made list of shovel-ready research projects waiting for immediate funding.
Get ready to act
The next six months are not a time for passive waiting. If the House and/or Senate change hands, the window to pass meaningful conservation legislation will open fast and close unexpectedly. NGOs need to prepare their proposed legislation and budgets, organize their data, and write their briefs. The tide is turning, and they need to be ready to set sail.