Dead fish

Dead fish are piling up at California’s pumps — and both Newsom and Trump are to blame

Newsom and Trump’s fragile truce on water is starting to show strain — and it’s because of dead salmon.

By Camille von Kaenel

The Chinook salmon has upset a quiet truce in the California water wars between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump.

Last week when the winter-run Chinook got caught in pumps that funnel water south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms and cities, California officials dialed down water deliveries in line with the state’s endangered species rules.

Their federal counterparts didn’t restrict the flows — at least not at first.

The fishy foul-up started when officials with the California Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation didn’t immediately agree on what to do when the salmon got caught up in the pumps beyond an allowable limit.

State officials argued their joint rules warranted an immediate ramping down of pumping, while Reclamation staff pushed for more analysis of whether the changes would actually help the fish population, according to two people granted anonymity to protect sensitive conversations. The fish are killed directly by getting sucked into the powerful pumps and diverted away from their habitat, but are also vulnerable to handling during surveys and to predators that congregate near the pumps.

The two sides eventually aligned after some heated back-and-forth, they said.

The state ramped down its pumps on Friday, and the federal government eventually ramped down on Saturday, according to Reclamation’s public reports.

Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson Mary Lee Knecht said the agency “continues to coordinate closely” with state counterparts.

But Newsom’s top water official acknowledged the disconnect. “Coming to a common understanding with our federal partners and continuing to share obligations is our goal,” Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth said in a statement Thursday. “If that common understanding cannot be reached in a timely way, DWR relies on its own legal and scientific assessments.”

The dust-up demonstrates the test facing Newsom as he tries to maintain relations with a federal administration that has prioritized boosting California’s water deliveries — to the point where Trump dispatched a DOGE employee to the main pumps in the Delta to add pressure to deliveries and hastily dumped water from two Central Valley dams in a misguided attempt to send water to Los Angeles that instead nearly flooded downstream farms and wasted summer irrigation water.

Newsom has sought to strike a conciliatory tone with the Trump administration. When Trump issued an executive order to “maximize” water deliveries to Southern California, Newsom issued one a few days later to also “maximize” supplies.

Just days after the salmon snafu, the federal government is laying the groundwork to ramp pumping back up, as fewer of the fish are appearing at the pumps this week. A federal analysis on Monday determined that keeping pumping at a lower level would do nothing to prevent overall harm to the population of the winter-run Chinook salmon, according to meeting notes obtained by POLITICO.

That’s in line with what water users want.

“We have a clear executive order to maximize water supply, and any decisions that reduce water exports must be fully documented and justified,” said Allison Febbo, the general manager of Westland Water District, which gets water from the federal government to irrigate Central Valley farms and has deep ties to the Trump administration. “This isn’t just reasonable — it’s common sense.”

Back-and-forth over day-to-day operations is common. But the talks are especially tense right now given that Trump’s order says to maximize water supplies even if it violates state law. It’s left environmental groups wondering which rules are being followed by whom.

“It doesn’t seem like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper. “The federal government is behaving erratically, and the fish and wildlife agencies are not doing their job to protect fish from going extinct.