Trump comes for the oysters, slashing budget of Maryland hatchery that produces billions

Everybody loves oysters.

Humble stars of the Chesapeake Bay, these mollusks make the waters cleaner and clearer, and provide habitat for other bay species and work for watermen. They also taste delicious — raw or baked with some creamy spinach and bread crumbs. Yum.

But popularity didn’t spare the oyster from the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental cuts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently slashed support for an Eastern Shore lab that has helped to seed an oyster resurgence in the bay. The agency’s funding for the Horn Point Laboratory, located on the Choptank River outside Cambridge, has been cut nearly in half for next year.

The cut comes at a moment of optimism for bay oysters. Their populations in Maryland waters have tripled since 2005, and bay states surpassed a 10-year goal this year for restoring oyster reefs in key tributaries.

To Stephanie Alexander, manager of the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery, a long-term loss in federal support threatens these achievements.

“These past 20 years of progress, what did we do it for, just to throw it away?” Alexander said this week at the hatchery.

The East Coast’s largest oyster hatchery, the Horn Point lab, part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, has churned out more than 18 billion baby oysters, known as spat, in the last two decades, providing crucial seed to restorations across the upper bay.

The roughly $340,000 cut may be a sliver of NOAA’s multibillion dollar annual budget, but the blow to Horn Point is part of deep cuts the Trump administration has imposed at the science agency.

Horn Point staff have heard little justification for the decision.

“There was no explanation,” said Mike Sieracki, the lab’s director. “NOAA did not say, ‘This is why we’re cutting.’ They just said, ‘Revise your budget to this number.’”

The cut comes in the last year of a four-year grant, and Horn Point scientists worry that losses could continue after next year.

After learning of the cut late this summer, they hosted NOAA officials, including the agency’s then-acting administrator, at the lab in September for a meeting Sieracki said was arranged by the office of Rep. Andy Harris, the Eastern Shore Republican.

Sieracki remembers the discussion as “very positive.” The NOAA team seemed impressed by what they saw, but since then conversation has stalled.

NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster said the agency could not comment on the cut because its budget “remains deliberative” while the federal government operates under the continuing resolution passed by Congress.

A spokesperson for Harris did not respond to a request for comment.

Since taking office in January, Trump has overseen sweeping cuts to NOAA and other environment- and science-focused agencies. His administration has proposed slashing NOAA’s budget by over $1 billion, including particularly severe cuts to the agency’s climate research.

Trump routinely dismisses climate change as a hoax, and his administration has argued that deep cuts are needed to purge wasteful spending across the federal government.

In recent years, the Horn Point hatchery has received an annual appropriation of $740,000 from NOAA, money it uses largely for staff salaries. The cut takes effect in April and represents a 45% loss in the hatchery’s federal support.

One of five UMCES labs around the state, Horn Point was founded more than 50 years ago on the old summer home grounds of chemical dynasty scion Henry Francis du Pont.

The lab housed an oyster hatchery from the start, but the operation has grown over the years. Today, Horn Point incubates oysters in eight enormous indoor tanks, each of which hold up to a billion eggs (that’s on top of five slightly smaller tanks). While developing, oyster spat feed on brightly colored algae from the hatchery’s algal greenhouse.

Between March and October, Alexander’s team works seven days a week, assessing the development of spat under microscopes and transferring them to chambers on the hatchery’s setting pier, where the young bivalves fix themselves to recycled shells.

Once secured, the infant oysters are loaded into boats that carry them down the Choptank and out to the bay or another of its tributaries, where shells and spat are tossed overboard to form new reefs or bolster existing ones.

The team has honed this craft through the decades. Lately, Horn Point has produced anywhere from 440 million to 1.8 billion baby oysters each year.

The hatchery is so prolific that officials from Australia, Hong Kong and New York’s Billion Oyster Project, a group aiming to revive oysters from near-extinction in New York Harbor, have all visited to learn from Horn Point’s technique.

“We’ve kind of invented the wheel,” Alexander said. “Other people have been spinning off.”

Still, Horn Point operates with what Alexander described as a “skeleton crew” of eight full-time employees. If the lab can’t cobble together more money, the hatchery manager expects she could have to lay off half her staff.

For Ward Slacum, executive director for the nonprofit Oyster Recovery Partnership, which provides recycled shells for the Horn Point hatchery and delivers them to destinations around the bay, the payoff isn’t just ecological.

The partnership buys shells from local watermen and charters bay captains to ferry the Horn Point oysters, Slacum said. At the same time, about a quarter of the oysters produced at Horn Point go to commercial farms rather than sanctuaries, many harvested for stores and restaurant tables.

The NOAA funds pass through the Maryland Department of Natural Resources before getting to Horn Point, and a spokesperson for the state agency said the hatchery’s oysters have helped drive recent restoration success.

“Horn Point hatchery is an essential resource to oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay,” DNR spokesman Gregg Bortz said. “A reduction in Horn Point’s production capacity would be costly to one of our most important ecological and economic resources.”

While oysters are enjoying something of a renaissance in the Chesapeake Bay, they’re nowhere near as plentiful today as when European settlers first arrived. Estimates of today’s oyster numbers range from less than 1% to 3% of their population 400 years ago, when their reefs created navigational hazards for ships.

Still, some scientists dream big.

“There’s a lot of pressure to just protect areas of the bay and build sanctuary reefs,” Sieracki said. “But I think we need to think bigger than that.”

The Horn Point director hopes the bay’s oyster population may be approaching a “tipping point,” the theoretical threshold where they begin to replenish themselves, without help from humans and incubators.

For now, bay leaders have targeted another 2,000 acres of conserved and restored reefs by 2040 — a similar achievement to what Horn Point helped realize over the last decade.

After committing to that goal earlier this month, bay states may have to get there without the full support of their main hatchery.

Oyster restoration has had to navigate tricky politics before — including disputes between watermen and environmentalists — and Alexander remains hopeful that her hatchery will weather this storm.

“That’s the beautiful thing about oysters,” she said. “Everybody wants more oysters in the bay.”

Correction: A caption in this story has been updated to correct the spelling of Mike Sieracki's name.