Bonneville Power Administration forgot that ethics are a thing 😮‍💨

The Agency That Profits From Destroying Salmon, Then Decides How Much To Spend On Fixing It

The Bonneville Power Administration was created by Congress in 1937. Its original mandate was straightforward: generate and sell electricity in the Pacific Northwest using federal hydroelectric dams. Today, BPA markets power from more than 30 facilities across the Columbia River Basin and is responsible for roughly one-third of all power consumed across the region. That is a staggering concentration of energy infrastructure in a single federal agency.

What makes BPA structurally different from most federal agencies is how it funds itself. BPA does not receive annual appropriations from Congress. It finances its entire operation using revenues from the power it sells. Those revenues go into what the law calls the “BPA fund.” The agency sets its own power rates through periodic proceedings called “rate cases,” and it is required by law to maintain “the lowest possible rates to consumers.” Rate stability is the north star. Everything else, including ecological consequences, comes second in the funding architecture.

The problem is that BPA’s dams do not just generate electricity. The court record in this case is plain about what else they generate: the hydroelectric facilities in the Columbia River Basin have contributed to the decline of what were once the largest salmon runs in the world. That is not an allegation from an advocacy group. That is language from the Ninth Circuit’s own opinion, citing prior circuit precedent. The dams block fish passage, alter water temperature, change flow patterns, and wreck the spawning habitat that Pacific salmon evolved over millions of years to use.

Congress acknowledged this in 1980 when it passed the Northwest Power Act. The law created the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a body made up of representatives from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The Council — developed in consultation with affected Indian tribes — produces a “Program” that lays out specific measures to protect, mitigate, and enhance fish and wildlife affected by dam operations across the Columbia River Basin. The NWPA then tasked BPA with implementing that program and operating in a manner consistent with its goals.

The tension between “sell power cheaply” and “restore a collapsing ecosystem” was built into BPA from the start. The NWPA was supposed to resolve that tension by imposing hard obligations. What the current court case reveals is how much room those obligations leave for BPA to keep choosing money.

$785 Million In Surplus Cash, And The Decision Was To Give Fish 10 Percent

When BPA’s power revenues run high and its costs run low, excess money piles up in the BPA fund. Once that excess crosses a threshold defined by BPA’s own financial-reserves policy, the agency is required to spend it down. The rules for how that excess can be spent come from a document called the Reserve Distribution Clause (RDC), which BPA adopts as part of each rate case.

In both fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2023, the RDC triggered. BPA had accumulated surplus reserves above the threshold, and it was time to distribute them. The RDC specified that excess reserves could be used for debt reduction, incremental capital investment, rate reduction through a Power Dividend Distribution, distribution to customers, or “any other Power-specific purposes determined by the Administrator.”

Here is what BPA proposed and finalized for each year. In 2022: 70 percent to customers through a power dividend distribution, 20 percent to debt reduction, and 10 percent to fish and wildlife mitigation assets. In 2023: 58 percent for a power dividend distribution, 31.5 percent for debt reduction, and 10.5 percent for fish and wildlife mitigation assets. The total pool across both years was $785.4 million. The total directed toward fish and wildlife: approximately $80 million, or just over 10 percent.

States, tribes, and environmental organizations all submitted comments objecting that the fish and wildlife allocation was too low. The Idaho Conservation League argued BPA was legally required under Section 4(h)(11)(A) of the NWPA to give fish and wildlife “equitable treatment” — meaning fish had to be considered on par with power interests, not as a rounding error in a budget line. BPA finalized the allocations anyway.

What Does It Cost When A River Dies Slowly While An Agency Counts Its Money?

There is a kind of loss that does not show up in any budget line, reserve fund, or rate case. It accumulates in the places that courts are not particularly good at measuring: in the smell of a river that used to run thick with returning salmon in late summer, in the knowledge that a fishery your grandparents relied on no longer functions, in the exhaustion of being a scientist or an advocate or a tribal member who has spent decades submitting comments into a process that moves slower than the collapse you are trying to prevent. The story of BPA and the Columbia River Basin is, at its core, a story about that kind of loss — quiet, compounding, and largely invisible to the people who made the decisions that caused it.

The Columbia River salmon runs were, by any honest accounting, one of the great biological spectacles of the North American continent. Millions of fish returning from the Pacific Ocean to spawn in the same gravel beds where they were born, traveling hundreds of miles upstream, feeding bears and eagles and the human communities that had organized their entire cultures around the annual return. The Nez Perce, the Yakama, the Umatilla, the Warm Springs tribes — their treaty rights, their ceremonial practices, their food systems, their identities as peoples — were inseparable from those runs. The court record in this case acknowledges, without flinching, that the hydroelectric infrastructure BPA manages helped destroy those runs. The word used is “decline.” It is a polite word for what happened to something that cannot be put back.

The Northwest Power Act was passed in 1980 precisely because Congress understood that the dam system had done damage that required active, funded remediation. The Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program exists because someone in 1980 understood that “consistent with” and “to the extent affected” were not sufficient on their own — that there needed to be a harder obligation, an “equitable treatment” standard, a requirement that fish be considered “on par with power” when the agency made its decisions. The court in this case references a prior Ninth Circuit ruling, Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation v. Bonneville Power Administration, 342 F.3d 924 (9th Cir. 2003), which explained exactly that: equitable treatment means fish on par with power. For the tribes who depend on those fish, “on par with power” is not an abstract legal standard. It is the difference between a river that still functions as a living system and one that functions as a power-generation asset surrounded by the ruins of an ecosystem.

What this ruling means in practice is that when BPA sits down to divide up $785.4 million in surplus cash — money that accumulated because the dams generated more revenue than BPA needed to operate — the strongest legal obligation to consider fish and wildlife simply does not apply to that room. The equitable treatment mandate, the requirement to account for the Council’s conservation program “to the fullest extent practicable,” the hard-edged language that was supposed to give the ecosystem a seat at the table: none of it governs how that money gets divided. The softer provision, the one that only requires spending be “consistent with” the plan, applies instead. You can write a check to the fish fund that is consistent with the Council’s plan without actually funding the plan at anything close to the level the ecosystem requires. Ten percent of $785.4 million is consistent with something. It is also, by any measure, a gesture.

The Idaho Conservation League and its fellow petitioners — Great Old Broads for Wilderness and Idaho Rivers United — did everything the legal system asks of citizens who want to hold a federal agency accountable. They submitted comments during the public process. They filed timely petitions for review. They argued the case before the Ninth Circuit. They are not fringe actors. They represent the organized voice of people who live near these rivers, who recreate in them, who study them, who love them. The court found their petitions timely and found that the cases raised issues “capable of repetition while evading review” — meaning BPA will keep making these allocation decisions every fiscal year, the money will keep being distributed before the litigation can be resolved, and the cycle will repeat. That is not a legal technicality. That is a structural guarantee that accountability is always arriving slightly too late.

The tribes and states that submitted comments objecting to the fish and wildlife allocation are not mentioned by name in the opinion’s substantive analysis, but their presence in the record is noted. They too raised concerns. They too were heard in the process and disregarded in the outcome. For the tribal nations whose treaty rights to fish in the Columbia and its tributaries predate the United States itself, this is not a new experience. Federal infrastructure was built over their objections. Federal agencies have managed that infrastructure for decades in ways that continued to erode what the treaties promised. The NWPA was supposed to represent a turning point. What this ruling clarifies is that the turning point has a floor — and that floor permits an agency to hand 90 percent of its surplus money to ratepayers and shareholders while the river system it damaged continues to struggle.

Every Damning Line From The Court Record, Verbatim

Below is every directly quotable and citable passage from the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Idaho Conservation League v. Bonneville Power Administration, Nos. 23-593 and 24-1653 (9th Cir. June 26, 2025). Read these in sequence and you will have the full legal architecture of how BPA escaped the stronger standard.

Three Systems This Decision Damages: Environment, Health, and Your Wallet

Environmental Degradation

The ecological stakes of how BPA allocates its financial reserves are not abstract. The Columbia River and its tributaries represent one of the most consequential river systems in North America. Historically, the Columbia Basin supported annual salmon and steelhead runs numbering in the tens of millions of fish. Species including Chinook, coho, sockeye, steelhead, and bull trout depended on the river’s complex habitat mosaic — cold, oxygenated headwater streams for spawning, deep river corridors for migration, and the estuary where freshwater meets the Pacific. BPA’s more than 30 federal hydroelectric facilities altered every one of those habitat elements. Dams created slack-water reservoirs where fast-moving cold-water habitat once existed. Fish passage structures — ladders, bypass systems, trap-and-haul operations — are partially effective at best and represent a perpetual maintenance obligation.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish and Wildlife Program exists because expert consensus identified specific, funded actions that could partially offset this damage. The program covers everything from tributary habitat restoration and hatchery reform to flow augmentation and predator management. When BPA allocates only 10 percent of its surplus reserves to fish and wildlife mitigation assets — as it did across both 2022 and 2023 — it is not choosing between equally valid priorities. It is choosing to perpetuate a deficit. The court’s own record notes that ICL argued the 10 percent allocation was insufficient to “ameliorate the effects of chronic underfunding.” The court found that argument legally irrelevant to the question before it. The ecological reality does not change because the legal argument failed.

Pacific salmon are not only important in isolation. They are a keystone species in the broadest sense of that term. Returning salmon carry marine-derived nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace elements from the ocean — deep into inland river systems. Those nutrients feed riparian trees, insects, birds, and mammals across the entire watershed. Wolves, bears, eagles, and dozens of other species depend on salmon as a seasonal food source. The river system’s terrestrial ecosystems are co-dependent with the fish runs in ways that are still being fully documented by ecologists. Every year those runs remain depleted is another year the broader ecosystem receives fewer marine nutrients. That deficit compounds over decades. BPA’s surplus cash is, in a direct and documentable sense, the funding mechanism that could partially address this. The decision to direct 90 percent of it elsewhere has real-time ecological consequences.

Public Health

The connection between BPA’s financial allocation decisions and public health runs through two pathways: tribal food sovereignty and the health of river-dependent communities. The tribal nations of the Columbia River Basin — including the Nez Perce, Yakama, Umatilla, and Warm Springs nations — hold treaty rights to fish in their usual and accustomed places that predate the United States government. Those rights are not contingent on salmon abundance. They are guaranteed. But the practical exercise of those rights depends on there being enough fish to catch. When salmon populations collapse because the habitat remediation that was supposed to occur has been chronically underfunded, treaty rights become nominal. The people who hold those rights cannot exercise them, and a primary food source — one with specific nutritional, cultural, and ceremonial significance — becomes inaccessible.

Traditional Indigenous diets in the Pacific Northwest were structured around salmon as a primary protein and fat source. Salmon provides omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, and high-quality protein in a form that has been central to these communities’ physical health for thousands of years. The loss of access to traditional foods is documented in the public health literature as a driver of diet-related chronic disease in Indigenous communities — higher rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders that correlate with the shift away from traditional food systems. The funding decisions that BPA makes about fish and wildlife mitigation are therefore not separate from Indigenous health outcomes. They are one of the upstream causes.

Beyond tribal communities, the Columbia River Basin’s recreational fisheries support the health and livelihoods of broader regional populations. Sport fishing is not a trivial economic activity in the Pacific Northwest. It is a public health outlet, a mental health resource, and a source of locally caught, high-quality protein for working-class families who cannot afford to buy wild salmon at market prices. When fish populations decline because the agency managing the dams that caused the decline is legally permitted to spend 90 percent of its surplus on ratepayer dividends and infrastructure, those communities lose something measurable and real. The people who lose it are disproportionately the people who were never consulted when the dams were built in the first place.

Economic Inequality

The distribution of BPA’s $785.4 million surplus is a transfer of resources, and like all transfers of resources, it has winners and losers. The winners in this allocation are BPA’s power customers, who received approximately 70 percent of the 2022 excess and 58 percent of the 2023 excess through power dividend distributions, and the agency’s own balance sheet, which benefited from debt reduction and capital investment. The Reserve Distribution Clause that governed these allocations permitted “any other Power-specific purposes determined by the Administrator” — language that functions as a catch-all authorization for the agency to direct money toward its core business interests.

BPA’s customer base includes large industrial power consumers and utilities across the Pacific Northwest. Power dividend distributions that flow through BPA’s customer structure do not distribute benefits equally across the population. Large industrial consumers that purchase power directly from BPA at wholesale rates benefit proportionally more from rate-related actions than small residential consumers. Meanwhile, the communities bearing the costs of ecological degradation — tribal nations, rural fishing communities, Indigenous fishers, small-scale commercial fishing operations — do not receive a power dividend. They receive an ongoing loss.

The chronic underfunding of fish and wildlife mitigation also has a direct economic dimension for fishing-dependent industries. Commercial salmon fishing in the Pacific Northwest generates billions of dollars in economic activity and employs tens of thousands of workers, from fishing vessel crews to cannery workers to guides to equipment suppliers. When salmon runs remain depleted because habitat restoration has been perpetually underfunded, those workers lose income. Those businesses close. Those communities contract. The $705 million that did not go to fish and wildlife across these two fiscal years represents, in economic terms, a subsidy extracted from fishing communities and transferred to power customers and agency infrastructure. The legal architecture revealed by this case means that subsidy can continue indefinitely, structured as a technical compliance with a weaker statutory provision, without the stronger “equitable treatment” standard ever forcing a different outcome.

There is also a generational dimension to this inequality. The decision to defer fish and wildlife funding now means that ecosystem degradation continues to compound. Future generations inherit a more damaged river, a more depleted fishery, a more expensive restoration challenge. The surplus money that exists today — money that could fund habitat restoration, tributary improvements, and flow augmentation — is being used to give current ratepayers a dividend and reduce current agency debt. That is a choice to move wealth from the future to the present, from the riverine ecosystem to the balance sheet, from the communities that depend on fish to the communities that depend on cheap electricity.

Putting A Number On What Was Withheld

The People Still Fighting, The Agencies That Should Be Watching, And What You Can Do

The Ninth Circuit closed this particular legal door. The “equitable treatment” mandate in Section 4(h)(11)(A) does not govern BPA’s allocation of its financial surplus. That is the law as it stands after June 26, 2025. But the court itself acknowledged that these allocation decisions will keep happening, the same parties will keep being affected, and the issues will keep evading review before the money is spent. That structural problem does not disappear because the petitions were denied. It becomes an argument for a different strategy.

Grassroots Resistance: Where Your Energy Goes

Support the organizations that are already doing the work and will be back in court or in Congress for the next round. The Idaho Conservation League, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and Idaho Rivers United are the petitioners in this case. They lost in the Ninth Circuit, but the court explicitly acknowledged their issues are “capable of repetition.” That means they will be back. Financially supporting those organizations is a direct investment in the next challenge.

Engage with BPA’s public comment process on reserve allocations. The court found that BPA’s allocation decisions are subject to public meeting and comment requirements before they are finalized. Mass, substantive public comment — especially from tribal members, commercial fishers, conservation groups, and affected communities — creates a record that is harder to dismiss and that future litigants can use. Showing up to those public meetings matters.

Engage your Congressional representatives on NWPA reform. The cleanest fix to this problem is a statutory amendment clarifying that Section 4(h)(11)(A)’s “equitable treatment” mandate applies to financial allocation decisions, including the distribution of surplus reserves. Call, write, and organize around that specific ask. Representatives from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington sit on the committees that have jurisdiction. Their constituents are the people most directly affected by the Columbia River salmon crisis.

Connect with tribal-led organizing. The tribal nations of the Columbia Basin have been fighting for their treaty rights to these fish for as long as the dams have existed. Their legal strategies, their advocacy, and their community organizations are the most experienced and most directly affected resistance infrastructure in this fight. Follow their lead, amplify their voices, and support their work materially and politically.