By The Columbian
September 16, 2025

The drawbacks to a Trump administration decision regarding salmon recovery are becoming clear. To summarize, the shortsighted policy has negative long-term impacts.

As media outlet Washington State Standard reported last week: “Northwest states, tribes and environmental groups are moving to restart litigation against the federal government over its hydroelectric dam operations in the Columbia River Basin that have harmed endangered native fish species.”

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said: “The federal government has put salmon and steelhead on the brink of extinction and once again broken promises to tribal partners. Extinction is not an option. Oregon will return to court to hold the federal government accountable and ensure these iconic fish runs have a future.” A spokesman for Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said our state is not a plaintiff in the case but has filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs.

For decades, salmon runs have been declining throughout the Columbia River Basin. Billions of dollars in recovery efforts have seen mixed success, and years of court battles have slowed the development of a consensus about how to best approach the issue.

In 2023, the Biden administration forged a $1 billion agreement with multiple stakeholders for working toward salmon recovery. The Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement included a provision to halt any existing lawsuits. 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.

In June of this year, however, the Trump administration withdrew from that agreement. The move halted potential progress; more important, it opened a door for the resumption of lawsuits.

In the process, the decision highlighted the capricious nature of the federal government under Trump. A “fact sheet” issued by the White House at the time heralded 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 Northwest.

At the same time, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed that removal of the Snake River dams would cost the region more than 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric generating capacity, demonstrating that the administration rarely is encumbered by facts. The average yearly output of the dams is approximately one-third of that.

But that is not the largest concern. As The Columbian wrote editorially: “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.”

The decision to withdraw from the agreement appears to be driven solely by desires to undermine any progress that could be associated with Joe Biden’s presidency. There are good arguments for maintaining the lower Snake River dams and the hydropower and benefits they provide. There also are good reasons for breaching the dams in an effort to improve salmon runs and, by extension, the orca population that relies on salmon for sustenance.

But rather than consider those issues and offer possible avenues for moving forward, the Trump administration simply threw the process into reverse. A resumption of lawsuits is an inevitable — and costly — result of that ill-conceived policy.

The Columbian: In Our View: Salmon policy ill-conceived, puts process in reverse