VANCOUVER, WA – The Trump administration has cut tens of millions of dollars from a key Columbia Basin salmon-restoration program run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a move experts say puts the treasured Northwest fish in further jeopardy.
The Columbia River Fish Mitigation program attempts to balance out significant harm inflicted by the Columbia River hydropower dam system on endangered salmon and steelhead runs.
The 46 percent cut to the program’s yearly budget comes amid tens of billions of dollars in cuts to the federal government that have hit scientific and regulatory agencies in Southwest Washington hard. It also follows months of speculation about what President Donald Trump’s Columbia Basin fish policy would be.
“It is outrageous that President Trump is ripping away critical funding to protect our fish populations in the Columbia River, which are so important to our economy, culture and tribes in Washington state,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray wrote in a statement emailed to The Columbian.
The Corps did not directly respond to The Columbian’s request for comment on the cuts. In a brief statement, a spokesman instead highlighted the importance of the salmon recovery program moving into the future.
“Columbia River Fish Mitigation funding is an important source for many projects in the basin,” said Tom Conning, spokesman for the Corps’ Northwestern Division. “As is typical during the federal budget process, we will work with our partners in the region to prioritize projects depending on how much funding we actually receive from Congress.”
Six Columbia Basin salmon recovery policy experts and biologists who work with the program said the cuts stand to unravel the program’s work in coming years — harming salmon recovery across the basin at a make-or-break time.
“With these cuts to salmon recovery programs, (Corps officials) are going to have to halt many important actions in their track,” said Tom Iverson, regional coordinator for Yakama Nation Fisheries.
Iverson also said the cuts are “inconsistent with the U.S. government’s commitments” to restore salmon populations under the binding Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement.
Salmon advocates made compromises in that agreement to get the government to agree to spend more on Columbia River hydropower system infrastructure and fish passage — not less.
Murky origins of a cut
Two Trump administration actions have affected Corps funding.
The first is a nearly $1.5 billion reduction in funding for the Corps’ civil works between fiscal year 2024 and the current federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
The second is a move by the administration to shift hundreds of millions of previously committed dollars from civil works projects in Democratic-controlled states to Republican-controlled states, according to an analysis by Murray’s office that was shared with The Columbian.
“Trump is stealing funding from blue states for no other reason than political retribution, and he’s playing politics with critical water infrastructure — it’s absolutely despicable,” Murray said. “This is not how things should ever work in America.”
In fiscal year 2024 — which ran from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024 — the salmon-restoration program was allocated $66,670,000.
But newly released Corps itemized funding documents show the Corps received only $35,983,605 for this fiscal year.
That’s despite Congress’ March continuing resolution funding the Corps at the same level for fiscal year 2025 as the previous year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
The cuts are even more drastic when the new $36 million funding level is compared with the $75.2 million the Corps was slated to get for Columbia River fish mitigation efforts for 2025 in the draft budget that the Biden administration submitted to Congress in March 2024 based on the Corps’ funding request.
The program’s funding has significantly varied over the past 15 years, according to The Columbian’s analysis of publicly available Corps funding levels.
The program routinely received more than $100 million in the early 2010s. But that was cut by about two-thirds during Trump’s first term, dipped lower still during the first half of former President Joe Biden’s term and finally rose to the past fiscal year’s recent high during the latter half of Biden’s presidency.
Legal requirement
The program evaluates how different parts of the hydropower system impact salmon stocks in the Columbia Basin and then addresses those problems through construction, habitat restoration and other means.
The Corps’ 2025 budget says the program’s work is “required” to minimize “lethal take” (killing) of Endangered Species Act-listed salmon and steelhead by the federal hydropower dam system.
Government reports released during the Biden administration acknowledged the hydropower system’s harm to salmon stocks and Native nations, as well as the ways removing four lower Snake River dams would benefit them.
Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead returns were between 10 million and 18 million fish before the dams. Recently, they’ve numbered about 2.3 million.
Wild fish in particular have suffered. A 2022 assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the number of “raw natural spawner(s)” in Columbia River tributaries declined substantially for nearly every run in nearly every river measured between 1990 and 2019.
Overfishing, climate change, habitat degradation and a rise in predators have also harmed runs.
All that has pushed 13 Columbia Basin salmon runs to the brink of extinction, placing them under Endangered Species Act protections.
Impacts
The Columbia River Fish Mitigation program will be partly protected from the immediate impacts of the cut, according to an email obtained by The Columbian that was sent by Columbia River Fish Mitigation program manager Ida Royer to about three dozen Columbia Basin salmon-restoration policy experts and biologists.
The email states that because of leftover money from the 2024 fiscal year, the program will end up with only a few million dollars less than last fiscal year.
But six Columbia Basin salmon recovery policy experts and biologists who work with the program said the cuts will create uncertainty that snowballs into future years, disrupting the program’s continuing operations.
That stands to further delay the long and ever-growing list of deferred maintenance biologists say the Corps must do — not just to support fish passage but for navigation and flood-risk management.
And even the limited cuts appear to be impacting the required program’s operations already, because they came so late in the fiscal year.
“There will need to be more discussion about the work remaining for the year, refined costs and program priorities,” Royer wrote. “More to come.”
This article was first published by The Columbian through the Murrow News Fellow program, managed by Washington State University.
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