Trump admin reignites battle over salmon, dams in Columbia River

A coalition of tribes, conservation groups and states first sued federal agencies over Columbia River operations 25 years ago.(CN) — The federal government sparred with conservationists before a Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday in an effort to overturn an injunction in a long-running case concerning salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin in the Pacific Northwest.“After a quarter century of judicial intervention, it’s time to return control of the Columbia River system to the federal agencies that Congress entrusted with that extremely complex task,” said Jacob Ecker, Justice Department attorney, referring to the operation of the 14 federal dams on the river.The lawsuit over fish conditions began in 2001 and had reached an agreement until the Trump administration in June 2025 abruptly withdrew from the Biden-era 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which promised to spend $1 billion to protect endangered steelhead and salmon.The agreement was the result of a deal struck with Oregon, Washington, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and the National Wildlife Federation, after they had proposed the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative.Under the agreement, the government committed to immediate measures to protect salmon, along with a decadelong plan to manage hydropower operations while meeting rising energy needs.The plaintiffs to ask the court to pause proceedings following the agreement. However, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to withdraw from the agreement in an executive order titled “Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Generate Power for the Columbia River Basin.”The plaintiffs — a coalition of conservation groups, tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon — then took the agencies back to court and won a preliminary injunction in February.The groups specifically attacked a joint decision on river operations issued by the Bonneville Power Administration, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and supported by a biological opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.U.S. District Judge Michael Simon agreed, but on appeal, the federal government argued the Barack Obama appointee had gotten it wrong.“Those agencies have designed dam operations and mitigation measures they reasonably concluded after years of thorough examination struck the appropriate balance between all the competing demands on the Columbia River system, all while avoiding jeopardy to any listed salmonid species,” Ecker argued. “District court concluded otherwise, only by ignoring those expert judgments and substituting its judgment for that of the agencies.”The federal agencies argued the preliminary injunction is more harmful to endangered and threatened fish than what was proposed by the agencies.U.S. Circuit Judge Consuelo Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, questioned why, in the challenged 2020 biological opinion, the agencies concluded dam operations wouldn’t cause jeopardy when they had concluded otherwise in a 2014 opinion.Ecker explained that mitigation efforts to reconnect the estuary and tributary habitat by 2020 weren’t in place in 2014.The judges turned their questions to the conservation groups.“In looking through these 25 years of litigation, you know, I recognize that probably if you got your wish list, you don’t want any dams, but that’s not gonna happen here,” Callahan said. “What needs to happen to return management and operation of the Columbia River system to the federal government?”Callahan noted that none of the biological opinions have satisfied the lower courts.“The government would have to stop recycling the same legal framework that this court has already rejected in past biological opinions, and it has to actually look at the effect on the fish here, not this legal construct where they try and just compare to what they were doing yesterday,” said Amanda Goodin, attorney with Earthjustice representing the conservation group plaintiffs.The groups argued that if the federal agencies implemented the proposed dam operations, the government’s own modeling shows that virtually every population of some of the most imperiled species will be gone.They also argued the federal government moved the goalposts on the analysis used between the 2014 and 2020 biological opinions.“You don’t just look at the improvement from yesterday, you look at the entirety of harm,” Goodin said.But the federal government argued the injunction interrupts important power generation operations.”We think that harms to public safety and harms to bull trout vastly outweigh the perceived benefits of the preliminary injunction, which the agencies expertly concluded were not actually real benefits,” Ecker said. “Instead, the injunction harms the very fish that the district court sought to protect, and the proposed action does a better job at protecting those fish than the district court’s injunction.”The Ninth Circuit panel — which also included U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth Lee, a Trump appointee, and U.S. District Judge David Ezra, a Ronald Reagan appointee sitting on the panel by designation — did not indicate when it would rule.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads