Trump spikes NW salmon agreement
Jun. 13—President Donald Trump is killing the sweeping agreement that pledged significant investments in salmon recovery and could have paved the way for breaching the four lower Snake River dams.
In a presidential memorandum issued Thursday, Trump directed members of his cabinet to withdraw from a legal agreement between the Biden administration on one side and Columbia River Basin tribes and conservation groups on the other.
That pact exchanged a pause in fish-versus-dams litigation for investments in salmon recovery, tribal renewable energy projects and studies on the best way to replace the hydropower, irrigation and commodity transportation made possible by the dams. While the agreement stopped short of sanctioning dam breaching, it was designed to lay the groundwork for the move.
Trump titled his memo "Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin."
"My Administration is committed to protecting the American people from radical green agenda policies that make their lives more expensive, and to maximizing the beneficial uses of our existing energy infrastructure and natural resources to generate energy and lower the cost of living," Trump said in the memo.
He also rescinded Biden's executive order issued in September of 2023 that called for a "sustained national effort" to honor treaty commitments to the Nez Perce and other tribes by restoring Snake and Columbia river salmon and steelhead to healthy and abundant levels.
Shannon Wheeler, chairperson of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, said the move erases significant progress on the effort to save salmon and steelhead from extinction. The fish are central to tribal culture and economies throughout the basin and are cherished by many nontribal people as well. The nutrients they return from the ocean are viewed as important to inland aquatic ecosystems and the decline of chinook salmon in particular has been tied to the problems faced by endangered southern resident killer whales in Puget Sound.
"This action tries to hide from the truth. 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," Wheeler said in a news release. "People across the Northwest know this, and people across the nation have supported us in a vision for preventing salmon extinction that would, at the same time, create a stronger and better future for the Northwest."
The deal between Biden and salmon advocates was expected to bring more than $1 billion in federal investments to help recover wild fish in the Snake and Columbia rivers and to help tribes develop renewable energy projects. The output from the energy projects would have been devoted to replacing power generated at the four lower Snake River dams.
But the agreement was viewed by dam proponents as an unfair pact for which they had little input and one that threatened to upend river transportation and hydropower production.
Dam supporters like Kurt Miller, executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, cheered the move. A news release from his organization said keeping the dams "provides a lifeline for the Northwest's clean energy economy and its most vulnerable families." Miller and others claim the agreement was one-sided.
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