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Trump order directing water away from conservation focuses on California rivers — not the Columbia

Order directs fish and water managers to route water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state

By Henry Brannan, Columbian Murrow News Fellow
Published: January 22, 2025, 12:23pm

President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to clarify comments he made last summer that led many in the Pacific Northwest to fear he would attempt to divert Columbia River water to Southern California.

The new details came in an executive order — titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California” — released just hours after he was inaugurated.

Last summer at a fundraiser outside Los Angeles, then-candidate Trump said “in order to protect a certain little tiny fish called the smelt, they send millions and millions of gallons of water out to the Pacific Ocean” instead of using it for agriculture or fighting fires by dampening the forest — an expensive and scientifically impractical idea.

The 6-minute comments caused controversy partly because he didn’t cite which river he was proposing to divert. And while he went on to describe details that aligned closely with Northern California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, he also said the water comes “pouring down from the north, with the snow caps and Canada.”

That led dozens of media outlets along the West Coast to report the comments were about the Columbia, which is the only river that starts in Canada before emptying directly into the Pacific Ocean.

Experts rejected the idea as “uninformed” and noted it would likely be impossible to implement. On the legal front alone, it would have to overturn irrigators’ and cities’ long-standing water rights, protections the Endangered Species Act ensures salmon receive and minimum water levels for ship passage.

It would also face regional opposition on principle and because of the growing need for Columbia River hydropower as Pacific Northwest states implement aggressive fossil-fuel free power grid laws.

While Monday’s order broadly echoed Trump’s comments last summer, it specifically cited the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The new action directed federal fish and water managers “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”

It is unclear whether the order will be able to be enforced because smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. California has also fought Trump’s previous attempts at enacting similar policies.

While neither Trump’s order nor his comments in September mention the Columbia by name, his agenda has touched on it before.

During his first term, Trump attempted to sell off the region’s publicly owned electricity transmission infrastructure, which is used to move and sell the vast quantity of power produced by federal Columbia River hydropower dams. The move drew strong bipartisan opposition and was abandoned.

This term, however, some have predicted the Bonneville Power Administration may lose a potential reprise of that battle.

About the project: The Murrow News Fellowship is a state-funded journalism project managed by Washington State University. Local partners are The Columbian and The Daily News. For more information, visit news-fellowship.murrow.wsu.edu.

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