One way Trump's DOGE cuts could actually help environmentalists in the West

San Francisco Chronicle​

a day ago

No big government infrastructure project made an imprint on the landscape and economy of the West more than the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's 20th century dam-building spree, which peppered 490 dams across the country, created an agricultural civilization dependent on federal hydrology civil engineering and brought about a welter of environmental difficulties after drying up dozens of once-healthy rivers.
Today, the agency claims a $1.4 billion budget to maintain its fleet of aging dams. It was perhaps inevitable that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would seek to cut it down. Approximately 400 workers at the bureau — including dam tenders, emergency management specialists and hydrologists — received 'reduction in force' letters in March, raising fears that poorly monitored dams could fail, creating catastrophic flooding. This, just five weeks after President Donald Trump stoked fears of mismanagement by ordering billions of gallons of water released from two Central Valley dams, against the objections of officials, water experts and farmers.
Turmoil in the federal dam management system represents potential disaster but also a prime opportunity: It offers environmentalists an opening to make a vigorous case for dam removal — a move that could save costs and please business interests while achieving a longstanding goal of getting rid of the most harmful and obsolete blockages on Western rivers.
At Fossil Creek in the high country of north-central Arizona, a gorgeous waterfall now tumbles near headwaters where an Arizona Public Service hydroelectric dam stood until 2005. Ask people swimming below the falls where the dam was located, and you'll get some puzzled looks.
'There was never any dam here,' said one, unaware he was standing right next to its remnants, masonry concealed under travertine deposits that give it every appearance of a natural falls.
Arizona built the dam in 1916 to run the ore-crushers at nearby copper and gold mines at Jerome and Crown King. Eventually, the dam also powered streetlights in Phoenix. But by the end of the century, the river had been killed and the antique plant was providing only .002% of Arizona Public Service's revenue. So the utility company took 14 feet off the top of the dam and let Fossil Creek flow, and a once-dead waterway sprang back to magnificent life. By 2009, Congress was impressed enough by the transformation to designate this once-tired industrialized trickle a National Wild and Scenic River. Twenty years after the removal, rare species like the Chiricahua leopard frog, southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo thrive in pools near the banks. Young cottonwood trees are growing. Algae are reblooming.
About 500,000 dams stand in the United States today, and 90,000 of them are more than 25 feet high. The biggest are in the West, but obsolete remnants of 19th century and 20th century industrialization also litter New England and other Eastern regions. These dams have served many purposes — turning mill wheels, impounding water for crops, preventing floods, generating electricity and giving livestock a drink — but scientific consensus now holds that they do more collective damage than good. The stagnant pools, mounds of underwater silt, mosquito-breeding artificial ponds and detritus of long-shuttered factories do little to enhance the ecosystem or the landscape.
But removing even useless dams is a complicated and often maddening process, according to Dartmouth College geography Professor Francis Magilligan. In some cases, it is unclear who owns a dam or has jurisdiction over it. Local groups may consider a dam a historic site. And even though it is almost always cheaper to remove a defective dam rather than repair it, the process involved can stymie those efforts. Only about 2,200 dams in the U.S. have been successfully removed, Magilligan notes.
Decommissioning Fossil Creek was possible because it presented a unique political case. Many people at Arizona Public Service felt proud of the dam and the plant, and resisted shutting it down. Even though it was practically an antique, the flume leading down from the dam to the Childs and Irving power plants was still helping generate 4 megawatts of electricity (enough to power about 1,000 homes) and making about $500,000 per year for the Fortune 500 company.
But the company was Arizona's largest utility and a powerful lobbying force in the state Legislature with a long-term interest in good public relations. There was also a personal quirk. Bill Post, the CEO of the utility's parent company, happened to be childhood friends with the outspoken environmentalist Robin Silvers, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. Silvers appealed to Post's outdoorsman side in making the case for Fossil Creek. Over the objections of colleagues, Post approved the dam removal as a goodwill gesture and a concession to Silver's lobbying just before it was up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The greatest environmental threat at Fossil Creek now comes not from stagnant water or unhealthy biomes but from a crush of human sunseekers and water hounds in the summer who create traffic and litter.
Scientists are looking at the long-term implications of shutting down the dam, assessing the movement of the 90-year silt buildup behind the dam walls, and the potential reentry of nonnative fish like bass and sunfish. And Fossil Creek is not the only recent high-profile test case for Western dam removal. A coalition of Native tribes in California convinced Berkshire Hathaway Energy to transfer ownership of four dams on the Klamath River to a nonprofit organization to oversee their dismantling in the name of rehabilitating a salmon fishery.
Not that science is a major concern of the federal government right now. Trump administration officials have proposed expanding the capacity of the Shasta Dam to hold back more of the McCloud River in Northern California. However, if DOGE is truly interested in saving money instead of making blind layoffs, it will take a serious look at a dam removal program and sell it to the public as a cost-cutting measure, ironically making the 'drill, baby, drill' Trump administration a champion of riparian health.