Federal Salmon, Steelhead Habitat Fund In Danger Of Being Fileted To The Bone

A program that as of December 2023 has provided $1.8 billion in federal money and leveraged another $2.2 billion for almost 16,000-plus projects that have restored, created or set aside nearly 1.2 million acres of habitat and reopened 12,000 miles of water for salmon and steelhead in the Northwest and rest of the US West Coast appears to be on the chopping block.

That’s according to a “pre-decisional” memo out of Washington, DC that reporting says is linked to a larger federal restructuring of NOAA, including the National Marine Fisheries Service, which alone would see more than a quarter of its budget cut, as the new presidential administration implements its policy and budget priorities.

Most of the focus in the media has been on how shrinking NOAA would impact weather forecasting and scientific research, as well as how new constraints made for “choppy waters” at NMFS at the start of salmon season setting at North of Falcon, but the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund would go unfunded in fiscal year 2026 via what’s known as passback.

Passback is a middle step in the budgetary process between agency requests and the federal Office of Management and Budget’s response to them. Technically, there might be wiggle room for negotiations, but it ultimately indicates the direction of an administration’s priorities.

In this case, the NOAA passback memo specifically states that the proposed budget “does not fund species recovery grants, interjurisdictional fisheries grants, or habitat conservation and restoration.”

That’s potentially very bad news for efforts to recover listed Northwest salmon and steelhead and restore their habitats, the primary reason for widespread declines of the seagoing stocks and best plan for recovering them.

In 2023 alone, PCSRF provided $166,746 in direct and $1 million in leveraged funds for a Middle Fork John Day River fish habitat improvement project benefitting spring Chinook and steelhead, $470,902 and almost as much in matching dollars for a lower Skokomish River project benefitting Chinook, coho, steelhead and chums and $623,884 in combined funds for an Idaho project improving habitat for steelhead and spring/summer Chinook.

PCSRF money has helped with restoring habitat for Oregon Coast coho, which are on the brink of potential delisting, and it’s not just fish that benefit from PCSRF funding but people, farmlands and rural communities too. Tillamook Bay’s Southern Flow Corridor project not only improved tidal wetlands for young Chinook and chum salmon, but the restoration work “resulted in widespread reduction in flood levels and duration including along Highway 101, a key commercial and transportation corridor,” according to NMFS. Making the estuary more productive for salmon was expected to also bring in sportfishing dollars to boot.

A competitive-grant program, PCSRF was created in 2000 by Congress “to reverse the decline of Pacific salmon populations” and it supplements state and tribal efforts. It prioritizes working on things limiting the productivity of ESA-listed salmon and steelhead “and/or are necessary for the exercise of tribal treaty fishing rights,” monitoring restoration work and largescale recovery planning.

Of West Coast state and tribal entities, Washington has received the most federal funding, $563.5 million, followed by California ($333.6 million), Oregon ($330.8 million), Alaska ($256.6 million), Pacific Coast tribes ($173.0 million), Idaho ($84.9 million) and Columbia River tribes ($71.3 million). State recipients are required to match at least 33 percent of the federal grants.

The passback memo also indicates NMFS’s ESA and Marine Mammal Protection Act work and Office of Protected Resources are slated to be moved to US Fish and Wildlife Service’s bailiwick at some future point. At this point, no reporting or searches indicate USFWS will take over PCSRF.

Moving NMFS responsibilities over to USFWS alarms Andrew Rosenberg, a former agency deputy director, who claims it would “create enormous problems for the fishing industry.”

“As much as they might not like [NOAA Fisheries’] actions sometimes, they’re going to be really worried that the [Fish and Wildlife Service] only cares about protecting species and doesn’t care about the fishing industry,” Rosenberg told Politico.

USFWS does run a number of federal salmon and steelhead hatcheries around the Northwest that produce spring, summer and fall Chinook, coho, and winter and summer steelhead for recreational, commercial and tribal harvest. But their ability to release those fish, at least in Puget Sound waters, was called into question earlier this month when a key NMFS staffer who oversees ESA compliance saw their job cut and then computer access shut off after reinstatement.

Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission member Stephen Parker of Yakima has warned that more than just lost federal dollars are at stake, “but also the loss of potential loss of services that federal agencies provide in helping us in management.”

A White House executive order last week aimed to make the US seafood industry more competitive and directed the Secretary of Commerce, who oversees NOAA and NMFS, to “pursue additional direct public engagement to ensure executive departments and agencies (agencies) are focusing core fisheries management and science functions to directly support priority needs that strengthen our Nation’s seafood supply chain,” as well as “direct the National Marine Fisheries Service to incorporate less expensive and more reliable technologies and cooperative research programs into fishery assessments” and “expand exempted fishing permit programs to promote fishing opportunities nationwide. Further, the Secretary of Commerce shall take all appropriate action to modernize data collection and analytical practices that will improve the responsiveness of fisheries management to real-time ocean conditions.”

Last week, USFWS and NMFS proposed to change standing rules that include the habitats of ESA-listed species in take protections, while the BLM is reviewing a rule that balances conservation with extractive uses on vast swaths of public ground in the West.