By The Columbian
Published: June 17, 2025

A decision by the Trump administration further imperils salmon and demonstrates the capricious nature of the president’s governing.

President Donald Trump last week rejected a $1 billion Biden-era agreement designed to restore salmon and steelhead populations. The Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, reached in 2023, was the latest effort to balance the region’s economic needs with efforts to save the endangered species. The plan did not call for the breaching of four hydroelectric dams along the lower Snake River in Washington, but it did create a pathway toward removal.

“It was one of the first times that we had a collaborative effort where people agreed to come together — nobody’s hand was forced, there wasn’t a judge or a court insisting on this,” Chris Wood, CEO of Trout Unlimited, told Outdoor Life. “Now, we’re back to the beginning — where we had been for the previous 20 years. Which is just relying on the Endangered Species Act to keep these most amazing of God’s creatures from blinking out.”

That is a crucial point. Decades worth of court arguments have slowed progress toward the shared goal of saving native species. Experts say modern salmon and steelhead runs are approximately 2 percent of their historical numbers.

Negotiations involving federal hydropower system operators, Native nations, environmental groups, sportfishing groups, clean energy advocates, and representatives from Washington and Oregon had resulted in the 2023 agreement and provided hope. As Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said at the time: “This landmark agreement will work to help restore salmon … using a combination of science, habitat restoration, and engineering efforts.”

The administration’s withdrawal from that is disturbing and is accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric. A “fact sheet” issued by the White House heralds the decision for “stopping radical environmentalism” and “putting America first” — empty buzzwords that are the hallmark of Trump’s management.

There is nothing radical about working to save salmon, which for millennia have been a cultural and economic cornerstone of the Pacific Northwest. And America does not benefit from ignoring existential threats to those species.

To emphasize the gaslighting on the part of the administration, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has claimed that removal of the lower Snake River dams would cost the region more than 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric generating capacity. The average yearly output of the dams is approximately one-third of that.

But the biggest shortcoming of the action is that it offers no solutions. It simply rejects an agreement, forged between multiple stakeholders, without offering a path forward for generating power, providing irrigation, enhancing river transportation and improving accessibility for salmon.

As Dac Collins writes for Outdoor Life: “In many ways, the agreement reached in 2023 provided a road map for these difficult conversations. It established a Tribal Energy Program to help the Columbia River Treaty Tribes develop their own renewable energy sources. It provided federal guidance for replacing and/or redesigning the current irrigation and transportation systems in the Lower Snake region. And it provided the funds to make these solutions workable.”

Instead, we will return to a labyrinth of litigation that had been paused in the wake of the agreement.

Trump has managed to break a deal designed to balance the region’s competing interests. In the process, he has failed to fix anything.

The Columbian: In Our View: Move to end critical fish deal offers no solutions