President Trump signed a memo intended to save the lower Snake River dams in Eastern Washington on Thursday, reversing Biden administration actions that helped support efforts to remove the hydroelectric dams.
Trump said in a memo that his administration was “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.”
He revoked the Biden Administration’s “Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead and Other Native Fish Populations in the Columbia River Basin” memo, which Trump’s administration said placed concerns about climate change above the nation’s interests in reliable energy.
Trump’s memo called for a withdrawal from actions that grew out of that memo, including an agreement between the federal government, the states of Washington and Oregon, and Northwest tribes signed in February 2024. The agreement stopped short of a federal decision to remove the dams, but supporters of the dams called it a roadmap to breaching them.
Removing the dams from Ice Harbor Dam near the Tri-Cities upriver to Lower Granite Dam near Lewiston, Idaho, “would be devastating for the region,” Trump’s memo said.
Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., who has fought to save the dams, thanked Trump for his “decisive actions.”
Removing the dams would have “threatened the reliability of our power grid, raised energy prices and decimated our ability to export grain to foreign markets,” Newhouse said.
But Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said, “Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about the Northwest and our way of life …. This decision is grievously wrong and couldn’t be more short sighted.”
She said the agreement put the region on the path to recovering endangered salmon populations, while preserving the benefits of the lower Snake River dams.
The agreement led to a pause in a nearly 30-year-old court case over Columbia River system dams, with the stay now in jeopardy, Murray said.
Under the agreement the federal government was required to spend more than $1 billion, including $300 million from the Bonneville Power Administration, over a decade to restore native fish and their habitats.
The Department of Energy would help develop tribally sponsored clean energy infrastructure to help replace hydropower production should the four dams be torn down.
Studies would be conducted by the federal government or with federal funding on how the services now provided by the dams could be replaced, including the barging of farm products and other goods, irrigation, recreation and electricity production.
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