The $4.5 billion federal agency charged with managing the commerce of oceans and their bounty is facing its first restructuring and modernization in 40 years, via an enlargement of executive offices and political influence.

Notice of the planned reorganization of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was announced in an internal memorandum last week by the agency's first-year administrator, Jane Lubchenco.

She said the intended "practical" impact of the changes will be to "allow me to take a more active role in many of our high priority programs and objectives," including the conservation and use of the fisheries — the flash point of controversy, especially in Gloucester and throughout New England — and a little- known satellite information system known as "NPOESS."

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) is the next generation of low earth orbiting environmental satellite, which has been well behind schedule and over budget, projected for launch in 2013 or later, and will replace a system operated by the Pentagon.

As much as any agency, NOAA is the repository of — and the agency most dependent on — the advance of scientific understanding, and for many years the bureaucracy it has been considered less than nimble and lagging behind the advancing curve of scientific developments.

The Department of Commerce is the cabinet-parent agency.

"Our agency budget, roughly $250 million in 1970, has grown top about $4.5 billion," Lubchenco said in her memo. "Yet the administrative structure has changed little since 1970. We lack a sufficient number of senior-level administration officials to manage our resources and effectively oversee headquarters functions."

Among the changes contemplated, Lubchenco said Congress would be asked to increase the number of senior-level political appointees from five to seven, and to reinstitute the position of "NOAA chief scientist" while making that a political appointment of the president, requiring Senate confirmation.

The request for a larger political corps at the top comes in the midst of an unexplained delay in naming a new administrator — itself a political, non-Civil Service position — for the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency within NOAA responsible for fisheries policy.

The only known candidate for the NMFS job at this point is Brian Rothschild, an academic researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth who helped build the School of Marine Science and Technology into a force that helped preserve the scallop fishery in the 1990s. The post is still being served on an acting assistant administrator's basis by James Balsiger.

Lubchenco had given signals last spring that she was preparing to make an appointment. Then, there were two candidates, but the rival for the post, Alaskan fisherman and businessman Arne Fuglvog, withdrew from consideration and the search was reopened.

Rothschild was in a delegation headed by U.S. Rep. Barney Frank that met with Lubchenco last week to discuss myriad fishery issues. During the meeting, Lubchenco gave to Frank an elaborate pop-up printing of Moby Dick, Mellville's classic whaling novel, according to sources present for the meeting.

But the same sources said Lubchenco made no mention of the reorganization of the unfilled NMFS post that Frank has made clear he would like to see filled by Rothschild.

NMFS regional offices in Gloucester are where the federal waters to the 200-mile limit are managed and fishing laws are enforced from the Canadian border through the Carolinas.

The fishing industry and NMFS — as well as Lubchenco and NOAA officials — have been locked in a bitter and increasingly "dysfunctional" impasse ever since Lubchenco was confirmed last March.

Her credentials as a celebrated academic scientist brought her accolades from the environmental community, especially the Pew Environment Group and the Environmental Defense Fund, organizations in which she held high positions, but the same lines in her resume gave many elements of the fishing industry reason for suspicion.

Lubchenco seemed to arrive in the NOAA administrator's office with a short agenda for fisheries that involved a rapid conversion of the commonly held resources in the ocean into "catch shares," a form of commodification that NOAA and the environmental advocacy giants have been pushing avidly.

Lubchenco attributed the beginning of the reorganization to the Obama transition team.

The plan was "approved by the administration and transmitted to Congress" last Wednesday.

Her press office and communications team were unprepared for questions about the expansion of executive offices that seem to be at the core of the reorganization.

Among the changes is the proposed creation of a deputy secretary responsible for operations, and an assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com