News Articles

June 12, 2025

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 cabinet secretaries to withdraw from agreements stemming from “Biden’s misguided executive action.” The agencies were directed to coordinate with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to review and revise environmental reviews related to the agreement, including a revised 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.

Hydropower relies only on water for fuel, but it is not entirely greenhouse-gas free because of gases, especially methane, released from sediments and plant material impounded behind the dams.

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, 28 different runs of West Coast salmon and steelhead have been listed under the Endangered Species Act and are at risk of extinction, including 12 in the Columbia Basin. Not one listed has recovered.
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 continue to support efforts for salmon recovery.

“The Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement was the result of years of painstaking work — this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize infrastructure across the Columbia River Basin, support reliable clean energy, and save imperiled salmon and steelhead runs. The Trump administration’s senseless decision to tear it up is a betrayal of our Tribes and a tremendous setback for the entire Northwest.

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, as climate change heats rivers and reservoirs and upends ocean food webs, and together with increasing demand and decommissioning of fossil fuel sources, is challenging power planners.

Industrialization of the river into hundreds of miles of slack water reservoirs also has come at a cost to native fish runs. As many as 10 to 16 million salmon used to come back to the basin, by one estimate; others peg returns to about 9 million fish predevelopment. Either way, those glory days are long gone; about 2.3 million salmon returned in a 10-year average from 2014-2023, actually an improvement from earlier declines since colonization and industrialization of the river.

Poor hatchery practices, rapacious overfishing and rampant habitat destructing with everything from farming to logging, road building, mining and development all took their toll — and continue to. Climate change and burgeoning populations of predators, native and invasive, are laid on top of all of these other impacts. The dams are only one of the killers native steelhead and salmon face.

Today some basins 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.

Seattle Times: Trump cancels landmark Columbia River agreement with tribes, WA, OR

President orders cabinet to withdraw from deal in which federal government invested in salmon recovery and study, in exchange for pause on lawsuitsEric Barker, June 12, 2025

President Donald Trump is killing the sweeping agreement that pledged significant investments in salmon recovery and could have paved the way for breaching the four lower Snake River dams.

In a presidential memorandum issued Thursday, Trump directed members of his cabinet to withdraw from a memorandum of agreement between the Biden administration and Columbia River Basin tribes like the Nez Perce.

That pact exchanged a pause in salmon-versus-dams litigation for salmon recovery investments and a series of studies on the best way to replace the hydropower, irrigation and commodity transportation made possible by the dams. While the agreement stopped short of sanctioning dam breaching, it was designed to lay the groundwork for the move.

"My Administration is committed to protecting the American people from radical green agenda policies that make their lives more expensive, and to maximizing the beneficial uses of our existing energy infrastructure and natural resources to generate energy and lower the cost of living," the president said in the memo.

Trump also rescinded Biden’s executive order issued in September of 2023 that called for a “sustained national effort” to honor treaty commitments to the Nez Perce and other tribes by restoring Snake and Columbia river salmon and steelhead to healthy and abundant levels.

"This action tries to hide from the truth. The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now," said Shannon Wheeler, chairperson of the Nez Perce Tribe in a news release. "People across the Northwest know this, and people across the nation have supported us in a vision for preventing salmon extinction that would, at the same time, create a stronger and better future for the Northwest."

According to a White House fact sheet published Thursday, “President Trump recognizes the importance of ensuring the future of wildlife populations in the Columbia River Basin while also advancing the country’s energy creation to benefit the American Public,” but it did not elaborate on how to save the imperiled fish.

The deal between Biden and salmon advocates was expected to bring more than $1 billion in federal investments to help recover wild fish in the Snake and Columbia rivers. But it was viewed by dam proponents as an unfair pact for which they had little input.

Hydropower proponents like Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, cheered the move. A news release from his organization said keeping the dams “provides a lifeline for the Northwest’s clean energy economy and its most vulnerable families.” Miller and others claim the agreement was one-sided.

“As someone directly involved in the broader process leading up to the agreement, I can say with confidence that public power utilities — who serve tens of millions of Americans — were deliberately excluded from the negotiations. In short, the MOU was never authorized or endorsed by the people or communities most affected by increasing energy costs.”

Abandoning the agreement will almost surely mean the issue will return to federal court, where litigants have battled for more than 30 years. In each iteration of the case, the salmon advocates have succeeded in convincing federal judges of the inadequacy of the government’s plan to protect 13 runs of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead, including four runs that return to the Snake River and its tributaries in Idaho, Washington and northeastern Oregon.

Prior to 1850 and the over-exploitation of the runs by commercial fishing along with habitat damage, and followed by development of the hydropower system, as many as 16 million wild fish returned to the Columbia River Basin annually. By the 1990s, that number dipped to about 1.3 million, according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Over the past two decades the return has climbed to 2.3 million.

Most returning adult fish are now from hatcheries and Snake River wild spring chinook, steelhead, sockeye and fall chinook are all protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Scientists have long identified the dams, which have fish ladders for adults and sophisticated fish bypass systems for juveniles, as a significant source of mortality. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went on record three years ago saying dam breaching is required to restore the runs to abundance.

Breaching would benefit the fish, according to multiple studies, but it would also end tug-and-barge transportation on the lower Snake River and reduce the amount of electricity generated by the federal hydropower system at a time energy demand is rising sharply.

When the Nez Perce and other tribes of the lower Columbia River Basin signed treaties with the federal government, the pacts enshrined in the Constitution protected their rights to fish for salmon at usual and accustomed places. The tribe’s have argued the dams are driving the fish that are central to their culture, well-being, religion and economies to extinction and amount to a breach of their treaty rights.

Chris Wood, president and chief executive officer of Trout Unlimited, called the president’s move a missed opportunity and “a good day for the lawyers.”

“The history of salmon recovery in the Northwest has been driven by court orders and regulations, and what made that agreement unique is that it was collaborative in nature,” he said. “I think it's unfortunate we are not going to give that a shot to work. What it will do is drive people back to the courtroom, and I don’t know how many salmon have been recovered as result of court orders, but I know there has been a tremendous amount of social and economic dislocation as result of that approach.”

Lewiston Morning Tribune: Trump spikes Northwest salmon agreement

May 31, 2025
Eric Barker

Wild spring chinook and steelhead from the Snake River continue to struggle while fall chinook are one of the bright spots in a biennial report from Washington’s Salmon Recovery Office.

The report concentrates on salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Evergreen State and says Snake River spring chinook are in crisis. There are only three populations of Snake River spring chinook that spawn in Washington. The Asotin Creek population is functionally extinct, and the Tucannon population is dangerously close.

Last year, 250 spring chinook returned to the Tucannon River that spills out of the Blue Mountains and joins the Snake River near Starbuck. Only 67 of them were wild. While those numbers are poor, they are an improvement over other recent years. In 2023, 30 chinook including nine wild fish returned to the Tucannon. In 2019, 22 fish returned with just eight of them being wild, according to the report.

The Nez Perce Tribe and Washington Department of Fish and Game have taken desperate measures to save the fish, including releasing 50,000 smolts raised at the Tucannon Hatchery below Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. They hope bypassing the need for the juvenile fish to pass through the Snake and Columbia River dams and reservoirs will result in higher survival. Any adults that return to the release point will be trapped and trucked back to the Tucannon Hatchery.

“When you start seeing fish and wildlife agencies doing crazy stuff like that, you know a population is in trouble,” said Chris Donley, fish program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at Spokane.

He noted this year’s run might be slightly larger.

“We’ve got about 300 fish in the system which is double what we have seen in the last five years in any given year,” he said. “But the vast majority of those are of hatch origin.”

The third Snake River spring chinook population that spawns in Washington does so in Butte Creek, a tributary of Oregon’s Wenaha River in the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area. The report did not include spawning information on the population.

Wild Snake River spring chinook are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The bulk of the Snake River population spawn in Idaho and 42% of the Snake River populations had crossed the quasi-extinction threshold — defined as having 50 or fewer spawners for three consecutive years — according to a 2021 analysis by the Nez Perce Tribe.

The same 2021 modeling by the tribe showed 19% of wild Snake River steelhead had 50 or fewer spawners for three consecutive years. The recently released Washington report listed Snake River steelhead, a threatened species, as “not keeping pace.” In Washington they return to the Tucannon River, Asotin Creek, Joseph Creek and the lower Grande Ronde River.

Donley said fisheries managers are bracing for a poor return this year.

“In years we have a lot of pink salmon it appears steelhead are not doing as well,” he said.

Snake River steelhead tend to return in lower numbers and at smaller sizes during odd years. It is an inverse relationship to pink salmon salmon runs that boom in odd years. Scientists speculate that the super abundance of pink salmon every other year stunts the growth of steelhead, also in an every-other-year pattern, as the two species compete for limited resources in the Pacific Ocean.

Snake River fall chinook were listed as “approaching goal” in the report. The fish that return in August and spawn in October and November have benefited from hatchery programs by the Nez Perce Tribe and Washington. They have exceeded abundance goals for several years and have been considered for removal from ESA-protection as a threatened species. However, in 2016, the federal government rejected a delisting petition, saying wild fish numbers appear to be dependent on yearly supplementation from the hatchery program. They also suggested the fish could be delisted if a population were to be established upstream of the Hells Canyon complex of dams on the Snake River. Those dams, constructed in 1950s and 1960s, cut off fall chinook from a majority of their habitat.

Overall the report said eight of the 14 ESA-protected salmon and steelhead runs in Washington are struggling or in crisis and six are improving.

“Salmon are critical to our economy and way of life,” said Megan Duffy, director of the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office in a news release. “They support our commercial and recreational fishing industry. They are food for other animals including endangered Southern Resident orcas. They are key to Tribal culture and treaty rights and they support many tourist communities. It is encouraging to see there is progress but the number of salmon populations still struggling reminds us that now is not the time to let up. We must continue investing in saving salmon so we all may benefit.”

The report is available at stateofsalmon.wa.gov.

Moscow-Pullman Daily News: Report says Snake River chinook and steelhead still in peril

May 25, 2025
By Henry Brannan/Columbian

The Trump administration has cut tens of millions of dollars from a key Columbia Basin salmon-restoration program run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a move experts say puts the treasured Northwest fish in further jeopardy.

The Columbia River Fish Mitigation program attempts to balance out significant harm inflicted by the Columbia River hydropower dam system on endangered salmon and steelhead runs.

The 46% cut to the program’s yearly budget comes amid tens of billions of dollars in cuts to the federal government that have hit scientific and regulatory agencies in Southwest Washington hard. It also follows months of speculation about what President Donald Trump’s Columbia Basin fish policy would be.

“It is outrageous that President Trump is ripping away critical funding to protect our fish populations in the Columbia River, which are so important to our economy, culture and tribes in Washington state,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray wrote in a statement emailed to the Columbian.

The Corps did not directly respond to the Columbian’s request for comment on the cuts. In a brief statement, a spokesman instead highlighted the importance of the salmon recovery program moving into the future.

“Columbia River Fish Mitigation funding is an important source for many projects in the basin,” said Tom Conning, spokesman for the Corps’ Northwestern Division. “As is typical during the federal budget process, we will work with our partners in the region to prioritize projects depending on how much funding we actually receive from Congress.”

Six Columbia Basin salmon recovery policy experts and biologists who work with the program said the cuts stand to unravel the program’s work in coming years – harming salmon recovery across the basin at a make-or-break time.

“With these cuts to salmon recovery programs, (Corps officials) are going to have to halt many important actions in their track,” said Tom Iverson, regional coordinator for Yakama Nation Fisheries.

Iverson also said the cuts are “inconsistent with the U.S. government’s commitments” to restore salmon populations under the binding Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement.

Salmon advocates made compromises in that agreement to get the government to agree to spend more on Columbia River hydropower system infrastructure and fish passage – not less.

Murky origins of a cut

Two Trump administration actions have affected Corps funding.

The first is a nearly $1.5 billion reduction in funding for the Corps’ civil works between fiscal year 2024 and the current federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

The second is a move by the administration to shift hundreds of millions of previously committed dollars from civil works projects in Democratic-controlled states to Republican-controlled states, according to an analysis by Murray’s office that was shared with the Columbian.

“Trump is stealing funding from blue states for no other reason than political retribution, and he’s playing politics with critical water infrastructure – it’s absolutely despicable,” Murray said. “This is not how things should ever work in America.”

In fiscal year 2024 – which ran from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024 – the salmon-restoration program was allocated $66.7 million.

But newly released Corps itemized funding documents show the Corps received only $35.9 million for this fiscal year.

That’s despite Congress’ March continuing resolution funding the Corps at the same level for fiscal year 2025 as the previous year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The cuts are even more drastic when the new $36 million funding level is compared with the $75.2 million the Corps was slated to get for Columbia River fish mitigation efforts for 2025 in the draft budget that the Biden administration submitted to Congress in March 2024 based on the Corps’ funding request.

The program’s funding has significantly varied over the past 15 years, according to the Columbian’s analysis of publicly available Corps funding levels.

The program routinely received more than $100 million in the early 2010s. But that was cut by about two-thirds during Trump’s first term, dipped lower still during the first half of former President Joe Biden’s term and finally rose to the past fiscal year’s recent high during the latter half of Biden’s presidency.

Legal requirement

The program evaluates how different parts of the hydropower system impact salmon stocks in the Columbia Basin and then addresses those problems through construction, habitat restoration and other means.

The Corps’ 2025 budget says the program’s work is “required” to minimize “lethal take” (killing) of Endangered Species Act-listed salmon and steelhead by the federal hydropower dam system.

Government reports released during the Biden administration acknowledged the hydropower system’s harm to salmon stocks and Native nations, as well as the ways removing four lower Snake River dams would benefit them.

Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead returns were between 10 million and 18 million fish before the dams. Recently, they’ve numbered about 2.3 million.

Wild fish in particular have suffered. A 2022 assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the number of “raw natural spawner(s)” in Columbia River tributaries declined substantially for nearly every run in nearly every river measured between 1990 and 2019.

Overfishing, climate change, habitat degradation and a rise in predators have also harmed runs.

All that has pushed 13 Columbia Basin salmon runs to the brink of extinction, placing them under Endangered Species Act protections.

Impacts

The Columbia River Fish Mitigation program will be partly protected from the immediate impacts of the cut, according to an email obtained by the Columbian that was sent by Columbia River Fish Mitigation program manager Ida Royer to about three dozen Columbia Basin salmon-restoration policy experts and biologists.

The email states that because of leftover money from the 2024 fiscal year, the program will end up with only a few million dollars less than last fiscal year.

But six Columbia Basin salmon recovery policy experts and biologists who work with the program said the cuts will create uncertainty that snowballs into future years, disrupting the program’s continuing operations.

That stands to further delay the long and ever-growing list of deferred maintenance biologists say the Corps must do – not just to support fish passage but for navigation and flood-risk management.

And even the limited cuts appear to be impacting the required program’s operations already, because they came so late in the fiscal year.

“There will need to be more discussion about the work remaining for the year, refined costs and program priorities,” Royer wrote. “More to come.”

Spokesman-Review: Columbia River salmon restoration hit hard by $1.5B cut to Army Corps of Engineers

Four dams and three large reservoirs were removed from the Klamath River in a project that finished last year—and acres of native wildflowers are now in bloom along the river’s edge.

Site of the former Iron Gate reservoir. Photo Matt Mais/Yurok Tribe

May 14, 2025
By Adele Peters

It’s been less than a year since the world’s largest dam removal project was completed along 420 miles of the Klamath River, near the border of Oregon and California. But if you look at the river now, you might not know that four dams had ever been in place. Instead of concrete walls and artificial reservoirs, the river is now free-flowing—and parts of the former infrastructure have been replaced by wildflowers that are in bloom.

“It’s been an incredible transition,” says Ann Willis, California regional director at American Rivers, a nonprofit that supported Native American tribes in a decades-long fight to take out the dams. “It’s really strange and wonderful to stand on the bridge that goes across the Klamath River and look upstream where Iron Gate Dam used to be. I used to imagine a river above it, and now I see the river.”

The dams were built between 1918 and 1962 to provide hydropower, and immediately blocked salmon from migrating. Over time, the ecosystem started to collapse. By 1997, coho salmon in the river were listed as endangered. (The river was once the third-largest salmon fishery in the continental U.S.) In 2002, when the federal government diverted water to farms instead of letting it flow downstream in the river, tens of thousands of salmon died. Local tribes like the Yurok—who have lived by the river for at least 10,000 years, and who consider salmon a central and sacred part of their culture—started the long fight to take out the dams.

Beyond the direct impact on fish, the dams impacted the larger environment as the flow of nutrients down the river stopped. Willis compares dams to a blockage in human arteries that eventually lead to a heart attack. “When you put a dam in a river, there’s an entire living network of things that depends on the flow of the river—the patterns and relationship of the river and its flow with the land around it,” she says. “When you block it, you start this long process of decline. That’s the bad news. The good news is one of the fastest ways to resuscitate a river and its surrounding ecosystem is to simply remove the dam.”

Former Copco reservoir site Photo Matt Mais/Yurok Tribe

The advocacy was a challenge. But the tribes and environmental groups behind the campaign were helped by the fact that it was ultimately more expensive for the power company to keep the aging dams in place than to get rid of them. The power that the dams provided was also relatively easy to replace, since it made up only 2% of the utility’s power generation. (The utility’s overall plan to meet power needs includes more investment in renewable energy, more energy efficiency, and a small amount of natural gas.)

In 2016, after years of negotiation, the power company transferred the dams to a nonprofit in charge of their removal. In 2022, the federal government greenlit the plan, which had a cost of around $450 million, funded both by California state bond money and by utility customers.

The dams were taken out in phases, with the smallest removed in 2023 and the rest last year, all carefully timed to avoid disrupting fish that might try to swim through the area. First, the reservoirs were drained. Then demolition crews blew up larger concrete structures. Dump trucks cleared away rocks, dirt, and sand, returning some of the material to the hillsides it was carved out of decades ago.

Plans for restoring plant life started earlier. A crew of primarily Yurok tribe members began collecting seeds from native flowers and trees in 2019. Most of the seeds went to nurseries, where they were grown in fields to produce more flowers and even more seeds. “There were over 2,000 acres that needed revegetation,” says Joshua Chenoweth, an ecologist who worked with the Yurok tribe on the project. “Because it’s so large, you can’t collect enough seed to just throw it back on the landscape.”

The crew eventually spread billions of seeds using a variety of methods, from hand-planting to using a helicopter in areas where it was too dangerous to walk. Right now, the hills are covered in California poppies and a mix of other plants. “The hand-seeding exceeded my wildest expectations,” Chenoweth says.

The fish also came back faster than scientists expected. “The dam removal was officially complete on September 30,” says Willis. “The first salmon was detected swimming upstream into that ancestral habitat in three days, which was just shocking. Then, within a month, 6,000 salmon were detected swimming upstream. I don’t think anyone expected this quick of a response at this really large scale.”

View more photos at Fast Company: These stunning photos show how nature came back after the world’s largest dam removal project

By K.C. Mehaffey
May 14, 2025

Forecasters are predicting significant reductions in returns of sockeye, coho and steelhead to the Columbia Basin this year compared to 2024.

Although smaller runs of sockeye and coho account for the majority of the difference, the biggest concern is over the 102,000 fewer summer steelhead expected to come back to the basin this year.

Not including about 56,000 Columbia River chum, forecasters expect almost 1.9 million salmon and steelhead to return to the Columbia Basin this year, a drop of nearly 700,000 fish compared to the almost 2.6 million returns in 2024. Chum are excluded since last year's run is not yet reconstructed.

The losses would not be offset by a predicted increase of 71,000 Chinook in the outlook. The forecast is created each year by the U.S. v. Oregon Technical Advisory Committee (TAC).

The committee consists of staff from state, federal and Native American entities. The preseason forecast will be updated to allow fishery managers to adjust fishing seasons so they adhere to harvest constraints.

Salmon managers from Washington, Idaho, Oregon and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission outlined TAC's expectations for this year's salmon and steelhead runs during an April 8 briefing for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

The forecast is not good news for steelhead enthusiasts as it predicts depressed numbers for the 10th consecutive year. If accurate, this year's returns will again be among the lowest on record. Summer steelhead returns to the Columbia River have failed to reach 1980 levels in five of the last nine years.

"We've really struggled in the region with summer steelhead," Charlene Hurst, manager of WDFW's Columbia River Division, told the Council. Summer steelhead enter the Columbia River from April through October, and most return from late June to mid-September.

A total of 55,600 A-index steelhead—including 19,000 wild fish—are forecast to return this year—less than half of last year's return of 121,579 steelhead. And just 11,800 B-index steelhead—with only 1,100 wild fish—are predicted to return, only about one-quarter of the 48,166 B-index steelhead returning last year.

A-index steelhead are smaller and younger compared to the larger B-index run, which are mostly bound for Idaho.

Hurst noted that the wild B-index run "continues to be on a long-term downward trajectory."

In Idaho, the steelhead are counted from July 1 through June 30 the following year. That's because the bulk of the run arrives in the fall and winter, Sarah Maher, Idaho Department of Fish and Game's Columbia River Program coordinator, told the Council.

There, too, steelhead numbers are expected to drop significantly.

The total forecast for steelhead returns to Lower Granite Dam in 2025 to 2026 is 25,790 steelhead, a little over one-third of the 85,152 steelhead that returned in the 2024 to 2025 return year. That includes a forecast for 10,270 wild steelhead, compared to 17,532 wild steelhead returning in 2024 to 2025.

The lower numbers of sockeye and coho predicted to come back this year isn't as concerning, partly because the drop doesn't appear to be part of a trend, but also because forecasting for these species isn't as accurate.

There's a lot of fluctuation in the sockeye returns as well.

The 761,682 sockeye that returned last year was a modern-day record, Hurst noted it was also significantly higher than last year's forecast of about 400,000 sockeye.

"So, we'll see what this year looks like," she said. The forecast is for 350,200 sockeye returns—less than half as many. But that would still be the third-best return in 10 years.

Snake River sockeye, which are endangered, are in a different situation, Maher noted.

In 2024, 937 hatchery fish and 84 wild fish returned. This year, 680 hatchery sockeye and 619 wild sockeye are forecast to come back, she said. Despite the drop in hatchery returns, "we're hoping to get a higher return overall," due to a better wild run.

Maher added that last year, IDFG did a trap-and-haul operation to ensure some successful returns. The operation has been necessary two of the past three years.

"That's due to some unseasonably high temperatures, and we just don't want those sockeye traveling an extra 400 miles to the Sawtooth Basin in a heat wave," she explained, adding, "That might be a more consistent management practice that we have to do in the future, depending on how temperatures in the water continue to change."

Coho returns are also tricky to predict, but a lot of work was done to improve the forecasting, Hurst said. Last year, 736,982 coho returned, and this year, 479,739 coho are predicted to come back. Hurst noted that there are many coho reintroduction programs in the Columbia Basin, and called the recent coho returns "a regional success story."

She also had good news to report on the forecast for spring and fall Chinook returns this year.

A total of 217,500 spring Chinook are forecast to come back to tributaries above and below Bonneville Dam this year—up from last year's 189,559 fish. And the 2025 forecast for fall Chinook is 717,400 fish—also an increase from the 669,505 fall Chinook that came back last year.

Roughly 38,000 summer Chinook are forecast to return this year, a slight drop from the 42,511 fish that returned in 2024.

Stuart Ellis, deputy manager of CRITFC's Fisheries Management Department, told the Council that the Columbia Basin tribes do not anticipate any commercial fishing in the spring, given run-size projections.

"In the summer and fall we expect the fisheries to be fairly similar to the last couple of years based on the preseason forecasts. This summer, the summer Chinook run may be small enough that there will be fairly limited commercial fishing but we do expect both summer and fall to have some commercial opportunities," he said.

Hurst added that the total returns are still well below the Council's goal to have 5 million adult salmon and steelhead return by this year.

The numbers also fall short of goals developed by the Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force—a NOAA Fisheries-led process that brought stakeholders together to develop a common vision for the basin.

Maher said the total number of Snake River salmon and steelhead returns have been fairly consistent for the past few years. This year, about 172,000 salmonids are expected to return, which is about 54 percent of the partnership's low-end goals, she said.

NewsData: Lower Returns for Sockeye, Coho, Steelhead Predicted in 2025