Federal regulators last week withdrew a proposal to rewrite guidelines aimed at ending overfishing in the nation’s oceans. Taking back National Standard 1 gives regulators the opportunity not just to further review the new guidelines, which the agency says it needs a year to do, but to re-write the rules to ensure that they actually conserve fish.

The rules, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in September, in some instances extended the existing timetable for rebuilding depleted fish stocks. The plan also lowered the standard for recovery plans, which must be written for depleted stocks. The current standard requires recovery plans to have a 90 percent success rate. The revision called for success only half the time.

Because of such deficiencies, NOAA received more than 250,000 comments on its updates to National Standard 1. Most of them were negative.

The agency should take this opportunity to improve the guidelines. It should do so by shortening, not lengthening rebuilding timelines. It should also require actual increases in the number of fish living in the ocean, not just plans to do so. It should also take the time to allow Congress to finish its re-write of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act, the law that governs commercial fishing. In effect, Magnuson-Stevens outlines the broad rules and National Standard 1 details how they will be followed. Without following Magnuson-Stevens, the standards are meaningless.

There were positive aspects of the revised standards. For example, it moved toward quotas as a way to reduce the catch of stocks that have dwindled to dangerously low numbers. The administration’s plan would have done this by doubling the number of fishers managed through what are called dedicated access privileges, which limit the number of fishermen who can catch a specified amount of fish.

The issue of quotas is also being dealt with by senators, including Olympia Snowe, who are currently rewriting the law that governs commercial fishing. The draft re-write expands quotas, but under pressure from New England senators allows this region to make quotas exceedingly difficult to implement. For years, the New England Fisheries Management Council has tried to limit catch by reducing the number of days fishermen can spend at sea and by closing areas of the ocean to fishing. Despite these restrictions, the target catch limit is exceeded every year. Hard limits, with penalties for exceeding them, are needed to stop overfishing.

With such provisions in place, NOAA can move ahead with writing standards that will improve the country’s fish stocks, not allow their continued demise.