Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.
It was a remarkable step following repeated failures by the government to uphold the tribal fishing rights it swore in treaties to preserve.
The agreement is now just another of those broken promises.
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday pulling the federal government out of the deal. Trump’s decision halted a government-wide initiative to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake rivers and signaled an end to the government’s willingness to consider removing dams that blocked their free flow.
Thursday’s move drew immediate condemnation from tribes and from environmental groups that have fought to protect salmon.
“The Administration’s decision to terminate these commitments echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chair Gerald Lewis said in a statement. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”
The government’s commitment to tribes, however, had been unraveling since almost when the deal was inked.
Key provisions were already languishing under Biden. After Trump won the presidency, his administration spiked most of the studies called for in the agreement, held up millions of dollars in funding and cut most of the staff working to implement salmon recovery. Biden’s promise to seriously consider the removal of dams gained little traction before it was replaced by what Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, called “passionate support” for keeping them in place.
The chair of the White House task force to implement the agreement quit in April because of what he saw as Trump’s efforts to eliminate nearly everything he was working on.
“Federal agencies who were on the hook to do the work were being destroyed through untargeted, inefficient and costly purges of federal employees,” Nik Blosser, the former Columbia River Task Force chair, told ProPublica and OPB. “When I left, most things were on hold or paused — even signed contracts were on hold, which is a disgrace.”
Trump’s White House announcement called the Biden administration’s commitments “onerous” and said the president “continues to deliver on his promise to end the previous administration’s misplaced priorities and protect the livelihoods of the American people.”
“President Trump is committed to unleashing American energy dominance, reversing all executive actions that impose undue burdens on energy production and use,” the announcement read.
But the decision could also have some unintended consequences, experts say.
Trump signed an executive order in April to “restore American seafood competitiveness” but in revoking the Columbia River agreement has canceled millions of dollars to support the programs that seed the ocean with fish to catch. He signed a separate executive order on his first day in office to “unleash American energy dominance” but has now reversed a commitment, made under the Biden salmon deal, to build new sources of domestic energy. This week’s action has sent federal agencies back to court, where judges have repeatedly shackled power production at hydroelectric dams because of its impact on the endangered fish.
“It’s tempting to comment at length on the absurdity of the President’s order, including the fact that what he says he wants — stability for power generation — is in fact put more at risk by this action,” Blosser wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Instead, I’ll look for inspiration to the mighty salmon, who don’t stop swimming upstream when they get to a waterfall.”
Back to Court
Before they began negotiating the Columbia River Basin agreement in 2021, federal agencies had been losing in court over the hydropower system for more than 20 years. Judge after judge ordered the federal government to use less water for making electricity and instead let more of the river spill through the dams’ floodgates so that fish could more safely ride the current past them.
The accord with states and tribes guaranteed up to a decade without those lawsuits. Trump canceled that.
The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells the hydroelectricity from federal dams, had more at stake than the rest of the agencies in the deal. When the government signed it, Bonneville Administrator John Hairston said it provided “operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”
In its most recent annual report, Bonneville credited the agreement for giving it the flexibility to increase hydropower production during times of high electricity demand, which helped stem the losses in an otherwise difficult financial year.
A major component of the agreement was the acknowledgment of the region’s dependence on hydropower and the need to build new sources of energy before removing the dams. It offered no guarantee of dam removal.
The Biden White House had pledged to help tribes develop enough renewable energy sources to replace the output of four dams on the Snake River, which salmon advocates have long wanted to remove. The administration also planned an analysis of how to meet the region’s energy needs without sacrificing salmon.
The Biden administration never followed through. Even tribally backed energy projects that were already in progress ran into bureaucratic quagmires. When Trump took office and slashed thousands of jobs from the Department of Energy, the commitment for new energy sources died too.
Proponents of Columbia River dams, including the publicly owned utilities that buy federal hydroelectricity, criticized the Biden administration for leaving them out of the negotiations that led to the agreement.
“I want to thank the President (Trump) for his decisive action to protect our dams,” Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Central Washington, said in a statement on Thursday. He said the Biden administration and “extreme environmental activists” would have threatened the reliability of the power grid and raised energy prices with dam removal.
Even critics of the Biden deal, however, acknowledge they do not want the issue to return to court, where judges’ orders have driven up electricity rates. When Bonneville can’t generate as much hydropower to sell, but still has to pay for hatcheries and habitat fixes for salmon, it has to charge utilities more for its electricity.
“I’m hoping that we avoid dam operations by injunction, because that doesn’t help anybody in the region,” said Scott Simms, executive director of the Public Power Council, a nonprofit representing utilities that purchase federal hydropower.
Earthjustice attorney Amanda Goodin, who represents the environmental advocates who signed the agreement, said the Trump administration’s actions would force a return to courts.
“The agreement formed the basis for the stay of litigation,” Goodin said, “so without the agreement there is no longer any basis for a stay.”
More Fish Will Die
The White House said that Trump’s revoking of the Columbia River deal shows that he “continues to prioritize our Nation’s energy infrastructure and use of natural resources to lower the cost of living for all Americans over speculative climate change concerns.”
Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, said the damage on the Columbia River is anything but speculative.
“This action tries to hide from the truth,” Wheeler said in a statement. “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.”
Wild salmon populations on the Columbia and its largest tributary, the Snake River, have been so sparse for decades that commercial, recreational and tribal subsistence fishing are only possible because of fish hatcheries, which raise millions of baby salmon in pens and release them into the wild when they’re old enough to swim to the ocean.
In some years, an estimated half of all the Chinook salmon commercial fishermen catch in Southeast Alaska are from Columbia River hatcheries, making them critical for “restoring American seafood competitiveness” as Trump aimed to do.
But some Columbia River hatcheries are nearly a century old. Others have been so badly underfunded that equipment failures have killed thousands of baby fish.
As ProPublica and OPB previously reported, the number of hatchery salmon surviving to adulthood is now so low that hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.
The Biden administration promised roughly $500 million to improve hatcheries across the Northwest. His administration never delivered it, and Trump halted all the funds before eventually canceling them with this week’s order.
Mary Lou Soscia, former Columbia River coordinator at the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration’s dismantling of salmon recovery programs amounts to “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
“We’re losing decades of accomplishments,” said Soscia, who spent more than 30 years at the agency.
“When the fish managers aren’t there to make real time river decisions, more fish will die,” she said. “Or the watershed restoration work will take a lot longer to happen because you won’t have funding and more fish will die.”
