Environmental Litigation and Salmon Recovery

Conservation groups, Native American tribes and the states of Oregon and Washington are back in U.S. District Court in Portland seeking a preliminary injunction to change how eight major dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers are operated, arguing current practices violate the Endangered Species Act and are pushing multiple salmon and steelhead populations toward extinction. The move follows President Donald Trump’s June 2025 decision to pull the federal government out of the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, under which the Biden administration had pledged $1 billion over a decade for salmon recovery and tribal clean‑energy projects—an accord the current White House denounced as 'radical environmentalism' that could lead to breaching four Snake River dams. Plaintiffs are asking the court to order lower reservoir levels and more spill at the dams so juvenile salmon can pass more quickly and avoid turbines, while the federal government counters that the request is a 'sweeping scheme to wrest control' of critical hydropower facilities that would compromise safe, efficient operations and likely raise utility rates. The fight plays out against a backdrop in which four of the basin’s historic salmon and steelhead stocks are already extinct, seven more are listed as threatened or endangered, and an endangered killer‑whale population depends on those fish for survival. Ports and navigation interests warn that higher spill could disrupt barge traffic that farmers and inland ports rely on, underscoring how the case pits tribal treaty rights and species protection against energy, transportation and agricultural interests in one of the nation’s most heavily dammed river systems.