Trump Administration Moves to Lift Protections for Fish and Divert Water to Farms

Those protections ensured that the California rivers and bays in which the fish swim would get preference over irrigation systems in times of drought. Multiple scientific reports have concluded that diverting those waters could threaten water birds and killer whales, harm commercial fisheries and promote toxic algal blooms.

The new biological opinion concluded that those salmon and smelt would not be jeopardized by lifting the environmental protections and rerouting that water. Once finalized, the change propelled by the opinion would allow water to be diverted from fish to farms by the spring of 2020.

In a prepared statement, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that the new findings followed “robust scientific review” and that the changes “will not jeopardize threatened or endangered species or adversely modify their critical habitat.”

“The new operations plan that has emerged includes more nimble and responsive water project operations that both protect endangered fish and allow the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing conditions — like the variable weather in California — to ensure effective and efficient water supply management,” the statement said.

Paul Souza, a deputy assistant director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said on a telephone call with reporters that the Interior secretary’s prior lobbying work did not influence the new decision. “There is absolutely no connection,” he said. “We are career professionals. We have led this effort with our teams over the past year, and this is career professional documentation.”

While the delta smelt serves no commercial purpose, decisions impacting its habitat extend directly to the interests competing for California’s water: farmers, fishermen and environmentalists.

“This is the most contested water problem in California,” said Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert with the Public Policy Institute of California. “The fundamental water question is how much water you allocate to the environment and how much you allocate to farms. This tilts the balance to farms. And this was at the directive of the Trump administration.”

Environmental groups again accused the administration of favoring preferred constituents over science.

The conclusion “flies in the face of the best available science, which indicates that stronger protections are needed to prevent the extinction of our native fish and wildlife, like endangered winter-run chinook salmon and delta smelt, particularly in light of the effects of climate change,” said Doug Obegi, an expert in California water law with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

It also brings both Mr. Bernhardt and his former lobbying client a big step closer to the outcome they have sought for years.

From 2011 to 2016, Mr. Bernhardt lobbied on behalf of California’s Westlands Water District, a state-chartered organization representing about 1,000 large farmers in an area of central California the size of Rhode Island. During those years, Westlands, which was his largest client, paid Mr. Bernhardt’s firm $1.3 million.

The group’s chief lobbying goal was to lift federal environmental protections to allow California’s fickle water supply to be used consistently to irrigate Central Valley almond, pistachio and cotton farms. As Westlands’ lawyer and lobbyist, Mr. Bernhardt pressed Congress for legislation to weaken Endangered Species Act protections on the delta smelt. He also joined a legal petition asking the Supreme Court to take up a case seeking to weaken those protections.

A New York Times investigation earlier this year revealed that four months after Mr. Bernhardt was confirmed as the deputy secretary of the Interior Department in August 2017, he telephoned the top Interior Department official charged with overseeing those protections and ordered him to begin the process of creating a new biological opinion document on the smelt.

In June, scientists working on that process produced a draft biological opinion that largely upheld existing findings: removing environmental protections for the smelt and rerouting the water would severely harm the surrounding ecosystem.

Tuesday’s new biological opinion rejects that draft and appears to be the culmination of Mr. Bernhardt’s efforts.

An Interior Department ethics lawyer, Edward McDonnell, did give Mr. Bernhardt verbal approval to get involved in the matter, but independent ethics specialists have said that, under the terms of the Trump administration’s ethics pledge, which Mr. Bernhardt signed, he should not have been given clearance to act. The pledge’s “revolving door’ provision requires former lobbyists to recuse themselves for two years from any particular matter or specific issue on which they lobbied in the two years before joining the administration.

The now-repudiated draft, obtained by The New York Times, concluded that lifting delta-smelt protections would jeopardize several types of salmon in the Sacramento River, an outcome that the salmon fishing industry has said could devastate the business. The decline of the salmon population would in turn threaten the Southern Resident Killer Whales, which live off the Pacific Coast.

That draft report was never publicly released, but the scientists working on it were reassigned and replaced, according to a report by The Los Angeles Times.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.