News Articles

by K.C. Mehaffey
Mar 18, 2025

This month, salmon managers are releasing roughly 48,000 spring Chinook smolts from the Tucannon River—a tributary of the Snake River—in the far-flung Kalama River, more than 300 road-miles away.

The release marks the first year of a 14-year effort dubbed the Safety-Net Offsite Strategy to help preserve the genetic diversity of this dwindling population of Snake River salmon.

Despite their best efforts, salmon managers say they’re losing the battle to restore spring Chinook in the tributary, which flows into the Snake River between Little Goose and Lower Monumental dams.

And it’s not the only Snake River stock in trouble.

“I think that the Tucannon is the canary in the coal mine,” Dave Johnson, manager of the Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries Resource Management, told a committee of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council March 10.

Johnson was joined by Chris Donley, Region 1 fish program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Jerimiah Bonifer, fisheries program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

The trio came to the Council’s Fish and Wildlife Committee seeking its support for the offsite program, which Donley described as “a fairly extreme action.”

The plan includes moving a portion of Tucannon River smolts from the Tucannon Fish Hatchery to the Kalama Falls Fish Hatchery each year for about six months before releasing them in the spring. Some of the smolts would also be moved to the nearby Lyons Ferry Fish Hatchery to be released in the Snake River.

Donley said the release of about 50,000 smolts into the Kalama River would result in roughly 250 adult fish coming back to the Kalama hatchery. Those fish would be trucked to the Lyons Ferry hatchery to be spawned. Chinook not needed for broodstock would be released into the Tucannon River to spawn.

Donley said efforts to restore the Tucannon River stock started with a supplemental hatchery program in 1985, using natural-origin fish from the basin. The stock did well until flood damage in 1996 and 1997 took out most of its spawning habitat, and production has been limited since.

Using scientific studies and adaptive management, fish managers have responded to every challenge, he said, adding, “We’re hanging onto these fish, but it’s not working.”

Donley noted, “One of the things that is puzzling to us as fish managers is there’s been a lot of work done here. Freshwater habitat looks pretty good in a lot of places.”

The Tucannon River flows out of the wilderness, and most of the spawning habitat is on public land. Habitat projects totaling between $25 million and $30 million have also been completed in the Tucannon River over the last 20 years.

Donley said it should be highly productive habitat, yet it’s not.

He said populations of spring Chinook upstream of Lower Granite Dam have survival rates that are double or triple the survival rate of Tucannon River spring Chinook, even though they are farther from the Pacific Ocean and have more dams to pass.

Scientists have identified some of the main problems.

One is that the Tucannon River is often warmer than the Snake River when adults are returning, causing a thermal barrier that prevents some Chinook from entering the Tucannon River. It also causes between 10 and 20 percent of the population to “overshoot,” or swim past the Tucannon River and continue upstream.

Predators pose another major problem for Tucannon spring Chinook.

Donley said birds and fish that eat salmon smolts have both increased in the Snake River basin. Last year, WDFW started analyzing the diet of walleye, a nonnative fish that is a popular sports fishing species.

The analysis found that walleye eat different things depending on the season. But at the peak of juvenile salmon migration, walleye bellies are filled with 100 percent salmonids, he said.

Tucannon spring Chinook are affected more because they are among the first species to begin the downstream migration to the ocean each spring. “They’re the only game in town for predators, and so they get picked off readily,” Donley said.

He said almost half of the smolts released from the Tucannon hatchery never make it to the Snake River. By the time the same batch of released smolts get to Lower Monumental Dam—the first dam they reach in their migration—more than 60 percent are gone. “That’s basically only 62 miles away from the release point,” he said.

Johnson said that Tucannon River spring Chinook have reached a quasi-extinction threshold, defined by 50 or fewer spawners on the spawning grounds for four consecutive years.

“We need to speed passage down to the ocean. We need to remove the injury and stress caused by physical structures—the dams themselves. We need to alleviate the artificial temperatures that are in the reservoirs, and we need to reduce the predation” that is unnaturally high because of the reservoirs, he told the Council.

Johnson urged the Council to consider funding safety-net programs in the Snake River as part of its Fish and Wildlife Program to help prevent the extinction of specific stocks, like the Tucannon River spring Chinook.

“The Tucannon [stock] is something that we all need to be concerned about. I hope that you as the power council take that as your real challenge going forth in the next 20 years,” he said.

News Data: Salmon Managers Begin Safety-Net Strategy for Tucannon Spring Chinook

Federal abandonment of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement is likely to revive decades-old lawsuits.

Miacel Spotted Elk
Grist

Earlier this month, the Trump Administration pulled the federal government out of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement — a deal struck in 2023 by the Biden administration between two states and four Indigenous nations aimed at restoring salmon populations and paving a way to remove four hydroelectric dams along the river system.

The move is likely to revive decades-old lawsuits and further endanger already struggling salmon populations.

But hydroelectric producers in Washington and Oregon have hailed the administration’s decision, citing an increased demand for energy driven primarily by data centers for AI and cryptocurrency operations.

“Washington state has said it’s going to need to double the amount of electricity it uses by 2050,” said Kurt Miller, head of the Northwest Public Power Association representing 150 local utility companies. “And they released that before we started to see the really big data center forecast numbers.”

Indigenous nations, however, say ending the agreement undermines treaty rights. Through the 1855 treaty between the United States and the Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla and what is now the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, Indigenous Nations ceded 12 million acres of land to the federal government in exchange for several provisions, including the right to hunt, gather and fish their traditional homelands. But in the 1960’s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of hydroelectric dams along the Lower Snake River — a tributary of the Columbia River — that had immediate impacts on salmon runs, sending Steel-head and Chinook populations into a tailspin. That drop in salmon, the tribes have argued, violates the fishing clause of the 1855 treaty.

“It’s a contract right. They’re not a special public interest or private right or anything else. (The tribes) deserve to have, and demand to be, respected,” said Daniel Cordalis, a water rights attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. “They’re just not.”

After decades of lawsuits filed by the affected tribes, the 2023 Columbia Basin Agreement put a pause on litigation and opened up possibilities for salmon restoration and the possibility of removing dams along the Snake River. With the Trump administration pulling out of the agreement, parties are back to where they started.

“The federal government’s historic river management approach is unsustainable and will lead to salmon extinction,” said Yakama Tribal Council Chairman Gerald Lewis. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

To date, fish hatcheries have struggled to produce enough salmon and steelhead to meet recovery goals. The restoration efforts have been paid for by the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency responsible for maintaining the dams and marketing the power generated from 31 dams along the river system to local utilities. For the last decade, data collected by monitors such as the Fish Passage Center, a federal agency, has shown the Columbia River system’s average water temperature rising to temperatures that endanger salmon.

“For as long as these dams remain in place, the fish will continue to be threatened and endangered,” said Eric Crawford, Trout Unlimited’s Snake River director.

A 2022 report by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, recommended dam removal as the best method to save salmon. In a Public Power Council statement, representing hydropower systems in the U.S, claimed operating costs for fish and wildlife mitigation comprise one-third of the bill to utility customers.

But Kurt Miller of the Northwest Public Power Association welcomed the Trump administration’s decision, saying that utility companies had been left out of the conversations that led to the agreement. That, coupled with an expected rise in electricity demand due to the construction of data centers and the Trump administration’s goal to “unleash” American energy, is likely to take precedence over salmon recovery efforts and legal contracts struck between Indigenous nations and the federal government.

“We have rights and interests that go through the whole United States,” said Cordalis. “We should be heard, we should be consulted, and we should be represented on all those interests too, not when convenient.”

The Oregonian: Salmon, tribal sovereignty, and energy collide

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