SEATTLE — A sweeping Biden-era initiative to restore Columbia Basin salmon runs, boost tribal energy development and provide a pathway for dam removal on the Lower Snake River has been canceled by President Donald Trump.

A presidential memorandum issued Thursday revoked the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which Trump stated “placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy sources.”

A statement from the White House said Trump’s action “stops the green agenda in the Columbia River Basin.”

The memorandum directs cabinet secretaries to withdraw from agreements stemming from “Biden’s misguided executive action.” The agencies were directed to coordinate with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to review and revise environmental reviews related to the agreement, including a revised environmental impact statement underway on dam operations on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Power producers, and other river users celebrated the news. They opposed the initiative from the start, and were expectant Trump would overturn it. Opponents said they had been excluded from negotiations that gave rise to the agreement, and that negotiators ignored the deep opposition of utilities and other river users.

The initiative was implemented with a memorandum of understanding signed in December 2023 with the Biden administration, the states of Oregon and Washington, four of the largest tribes in the Columbia Basin and conservation partners. It was intended in part to help restore salmon runs and in part by opening a pathway to dam removal by providing funds and federal agency support for replacing services of the four Lower Snake River Dams with alternative power, transportation and irrigation infrastructure.

Kurt Miller, CEO and executive director of the Northwest Public Power Association, cheered the Trump directive. “This withdrawal is a necessary course correction toward energy reliability, affordability, and transparency,” Miller said in a prepared statement. “In an era of skyrocketing electricity demand, these dams are essential to maintaining grid reliability and keeping energy bills affordable.”

River users have long argued the Lower Snake dams should not be breached because they provide affordable, reliable and low-carbon electricity to millions of residents and businesses across the Pacific Northwest.

“Now is the time to come together and chart a sustainable path toward effective solutions that protect salmon and maintain affordable and reliable hydropower needed by millions of people in the Pacific Northwest,” said Clark Mather, executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, a trade association of river users.

Hydropower relies only on water for fuel, but it is not entirely greenhouse-gas free because of gases, especially methane, released from sediments and plant material impounded behind the dams.

Dam operations on the Columbia and Snake have been fought over for more than 30 years, in one of the longest-running unresolved legal fights in the region. As the back-and-forth fight over salmon and dams continue, 28 different runs of West Coast salmon and steelhead have been listed under the Endangered Species Act and are at risk of extinction, including 12 in the Columbia Basin. Not one listed has recovered.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray blasted the upending of the agreement — which she helped cement.

“ Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about the Northwest and our way of life — so of course, he is abruptly and unilaterally upending a historic agreement that finally put us on a path to salmon recovery, while preserving stable dam operations for growers and producers, public utilities, river users, ports and others throughout the Northwest,” Murray said in a prepared statement. “This decision is grievously wrong and couldn’t be more shortsighted.”

She promised the fight would continue including through the appropriations process where she said she intends to continue to support efforts for salmon recovery.

“The Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement was the result of years of painstaking work — this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize infrastructure across the Columbia River Basin, support reliable clean energy, and save imperiled salmon and steelhead runs. The Trump administration’s senseless decision to tear it up is a betrayal of our Tribes and a tremendous setback for the entire Northwest.”

Fishing and conservation groups also decried the rollback.

“It’s a big loss for the Northwest’s economy, and a dagger to the heart of our industry,” said Liz Hamilton, policy director with the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.

The fight is far from over, noted Earthjustice senior attorney Amanda Goodin, which represented plaintiffs that had agreed to stay their litigation over dam operations in return for the now-canceled agreement. “So without the agreement, there is no longer any basis for a stay,” Goodin said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this short-sighted decision to renege on this important agreement is just the latest in a series of anti-government and anti-science actions coming from the Trump administration.”

The Columbia is the great river of the West, draining a vast region, and tapped since the 1900s for hydropower. The dams on the Columbia and Snake include locks that permit deep-water navigation all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, for shippers. Irrigators water crops with pumps tapping the pool at one of the Lower Snake River Dams. But the Columbia is at a crossroads, as climate change heats rivers and reservoirs and upends ocean food webs, and together with increasing demand and decommissioning of fossil fuel sources, is challenging power planners.

Industrialization of the river into hundreds of miles of slack water reservoirs also has come at a cost to native fish runs. As many as 10 to 16 million salmon used to come back to the basin, by one estimate; others peg returns to about 9 million fish predevelopment. Either way, those glory days are long gone; about 2.3 million salmon returned in a 10-year average from 2014-2023, actually an improvement from earlier declines since colonization and industrialization of the river.

Poor hatchery practices, rapacious overfishing and rampant habitat destructing with everything from farming to logging, road building, mining and development all took their toll — and continue to. Climate change and burgeoning populations of predators, native and invasive, are laid on top of all of these other impacts. The dams are only one of the killers native steelhead and salmon face.

Today some basins see only about 50 fish come back — these populations, in what was once the most productive Chinook spawning ground in the Snake basin — are nearly extinct.

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