The White House killed a negotiated deal to save salmon. The rivers’ protectors must return to court.

December 20, 2025
By Marc Sullivan / For The Herald

We’ve been hearing a lot lately from public utilities and other Columbia River user groups calling on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and others challenging the Trump administration’s inadequate and illegal salmon recovery plan to choose “collaboration” over litigation.

The problem is this: Collaboration must be built on a foundation of trust, and defenders of the failed status quo have given salmon advocates little or no reason to trust their good faith. Just look at the record:

The fact is that since 2023, we did have a credible plan that balanced the salmon and dams equation. That plan was the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement. The agreement was the result of a collaborative process involving the states of Washington and Oregon, four Northwest Tribes, 10 non-governmental advocacy organizations, and the Biden administration. Input from other stakeholders, like these user groups, was welcomed and encouraged but they brought nothing to the table other than a defense of the Trump salmon plan.

This June, the Trump administration unilaterally abrogated the government’s support of that agreement. The agreement had allowed salmon advocates to pause litigation challenging the 2020 Trump administration salmon recovery plan. With collaboration tossed aside, salmon advocates have had no choice but to return to court.

This was just the latest chapter in a decades-long saga of bad faith plans for recovery of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin. The responsible federal agencies — the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which operates dams on the lower Snake and lower Columbia rivers), the Bonneville Power Administration (which markets power from the dams), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which rules on whether recovery plans comply with the Endangered Species Act) — have, since 1992, issued no fewer than eight plans for operating the hydropower system while ostensibly protecting threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.

Over three decades of litigation, three different federal District Court judges have declared six different federal dam management plans illegal for their failure to protect salmon and steelhead. That includes every plan since 2000. The very first plan was invalidated in 1994 by U.S. District Judge Malcolm Marsh, who proclaimed that the “situation literally cries out for a major overhaul.” He found that the federal plan failed to deliver any such fundamental change. Fast forward to 2005, when District Court Judge James Redden struck down a 2004 federal plan, a plan he later called a “cynical and transparent attempt to avoid responsibility for the decline of listed Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead.”

Why should salmon advocates, given that history, believe that these agencies, and their allies, are now ready to engage in good faith collaborative efforts to have both salmon and clean energy?

Since the Trump administration’s reneged on the Resilient Columbia Basic Agreement, public utilities and other river users have spent a lot of money on a sustained campaign of paid propaganda in the regional press, claiming, implausibly, that salmon and steelhead are positively thriving in the presence of dams and calling for, yes, collaboration rather than resort to the courts. The fact is that, according to Earthjustice, which represents non-governmental litigants, “Nearly all remaining wild salmon and steelhead stocks in the basin are in serious trouble, especially those that return to the Snake River to spawn. Most remaining wild salmon and steelhead populations are less than 5 percent of their pre-1850s levels. Some, including several from the Snake River, are less than 1 percent of their historic levels.”

Why should salmon advocates, in the face of a campaign of misinformation and hypocrisy, believe that good faith collaboration is on offer? Being clear-eyed, rather than naïve, is what the times call for.

Marc Sullivan is co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Washington Chapter Conservation Committee. The Sierra Club is a plaintiff in the litigation challenging the Trump administration salmon plan. He lives near Sequim, on the Olympic Peninsula.

Everett Herald: Comment: No trust due an administration that ended river pact