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Time is running out for wild salmon in the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest. Their populations, as well as those of some other native fish, have been declining for decades. Now, President Donald Trump is attacking the progress that had been made to restore those once-abundant salmon runs.

In June 2025, Trump signed a memorandum signaling his administration’s unwillingness to consider dam removal on the lower Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia River, and reneging on a landmark agreement that would have provided more than a billion dollars over the next decade to Pacific Northwest tribes for renewable energy projects and salmon recovery.

The federal government entered into the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement under the Biden administration in December 2023 after two years of negotiations. Other parties to the agreement include environmental advocates; Oregon; Washington; and the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes. Those tribes entered into treaties with the U.S. government in the mid-1850s, ceding land but maintaining a perpetual right to their fishing grounds in the Columbia River Basin. The government has failed to ensure the tribal fishing rights it promised to protect in those treaties.

Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chair Gerald Lewis said in a statement that the Trump administration’s withdrawal “echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes.” Still, others who were involved in negotiations to secure that agreement have vowed to continue efforts to restore salmon populations and fulfill treaty obligations even as the federal government seeks to undermine them.

“The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of this agreement is short-sighted and regrettable,” Miles Johnson, legal director at Columbia Riverkeeper, told Truthout. “But folks in the Pacific Northwest who care about salmon, and salmon cultures and our rivers, we don’t get to stop working on this just because it becomes more challenging.”

Dozens of hydroelectric dams built beginning almost a century ago on the Columbia River and its largest tributary, the Snake River, eliminated spawning grounds, blocked fish passage between spawning and rearing habitats, and altered river ecology in ways that can impair a salmon’s immune system or undermine their natural migration instincts. More recently, climate change has

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