A sweeping Biden-era initiative to restore Columbia Basin salmon runs, boost tribal energy development and provide a pathway for dam removal on the Lower Snake River has been canceled by President Donald Trump.
A presidential memorandum issued Thursday revoked the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which Trump stated “placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy sources.”
A statement from the White House said Trump’s action “stops the green agenda in the Columbia River Basin.”
The memorandum directs federal agencies to withdraw from agreements stemming from “Biden’s misguided executive action.” In coordination with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, they are to review and revise environmental reviews related to the agreement, including an environmental impact statement underway on dam operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Power producers, and other river users celebrated the news. They opposed the initiative from the start, and were expectant Trump would overturn it. Opponents said they had been excluded from negotiations that gave rise to the agreement, and that negotiators ignored the deep opposition of utilities and other river users.
The initiative was implemented with a memorandum of understanding signed in December 2023 with the Biden administration, the states of Oregon and Washington, four of the largest tribes in the Columbia Basin and conservation partners. It was intended in part to help restore salmon runs and in part by opening a pathway to dam removal by providing funds and federal agency support for replacing services of the four Lower Snake River Dams with alternative power, transportation and irrigation infrastructure.
Kurt Miller, CEO and executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, cheered the Trump directive. “This withdrawal is a necessary course correction toward energy reliability, affordability, and transparency,” Miller said in a prepared statement. “In an era of skyrocketing electricity demand, these dams are essential to maintaining grid reliability and keeping energy bills affordable.”
River users have long argued the Lower Snake dams should not be breached because they provide affordable, reliable and low-carbon electricity to millions of residents and businesses across the Pacific Northwest.
“Now is the time to come together and chart a sustainable path toward effective solutions that protect salmon and maintain affordable and reliable hydropower needed by millions of people in the Pacific Northwest,” said Clark Mather, executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, a trade association of river users.
Dam operations on the Columbia and Snake have been fought over for more than 30 years, in one of the longest-running unresolved legal fights in the region. As the back-and-forth fight over salmon and dams continue, 12 populations of salmon and steelhead have been listed under the Endangered Species Act in the Columbia Basin.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray blasted the upending of the agreement — which she helped cement.
“Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about the Northwest and our way of life — so of course, he is abruptly and unilaterally upending a historic agreement that finally put us on a path to salmon recovery, while preserving stable dam operations for growers and producers, public utilities, river users, ports and others throughout the Northwest,” Murray said in a prepared statement. “This decision is grievously wrong and couldn’t be more shortsighted.”
She promised the fight would continue including through the appropriations process where she said she intends to support efforts for salmon recovery.
Fishing and conservation groups also decried the rollback.
“It’s a big loss for the Northwest’s economy, and a dagger to the heart of our industry,” said Liz Hamilton, policy director with the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.
The fight is far from over, noted Earthjustice senior attorney Amanda Goodin, which represented plaintiffs that had agreed to stay their litigation over dam operations in return for the now-canceled agreement. “So without the agreement, there is no longer any basis for a stay,” Goodin said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this short-sighted decision to renege on this important agreement is just the latest in a series of anti-government and anti-science actions coming from the Trump administration.”
The Columbia is the great river of the West, draining a vast region, and tapped since the 1900s for hydropower. The dams on the Columbia and Snake include locks that permit deep-water navigation all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, for shippers. Irrigators water crops with pumps tapping the pool at one of the Lower Snake River Dams. But the Columbia is at a crossroads, facing challenges of climate change, invasive species, crashing salmon runs and power reliability all worsened by climate change.
Today some Columbia Basin streams see only about 50 fish come back — these populations, in what was once the most productive Chinook spawning ground in the Snake basin — are nearly extinct.
The Nez Perce Tribe used to have months and months of fishing on the river, but today has only days, said Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe. “And that isn’t what we reserved in the treaty,” he said, referring to the Treaty of 1855 between the Nez Perce Tribe and the United States, under which the tribe ceded millions of acres of land for settlement. “When we think of going back to the status quo, that is really something detrimental to the salmon, and all the salmon provide.”
Wheeler hasn’t given up on making progress. “We hope that sometime in the future the administration would like to talk with us around the issues surrounding the salmon populations in the Northwest, and have the conversation about what the answer is then. Because status quo has had a negative trajectory.”
