There are certain things former President Donald Trump vehemently dislikes: Taylor Swift. Low-flow toilets. And a 3-inch-long endangered fish that lives in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in California.
Although it draws less attention than his other annoyances — Swift for her endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid and water-efficient toilets for requiring repeated flushes — Trump is unusually dedicated to his nearly decadelong grudge against the tiny delta smelt.
Last week, Trump once again took aim at the delta smelt at a press conference near Los Angeles, garnering headlines for promising California voters he would curb environmental protections in the frequently drought-stricken state in order to “give you more water than almost anybody has.”
What began as an apparent bid to sway voters in the California Republican presidential primary in 2016 has since morphed into one of Trump’s most persistent campaign themes when he travels the western U.S., offering up his distaste for environmental regulations while touting support for some of the agricultural industry’s biggest players.
Whether it will work out for Trump better than it has for the delta smelt — a fish considered functionally extinct that was only found in the San Francisco Estuary, which is fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers — remains to be seen.
Trump’s water promises capture a reality in California: a clash over who should receive flows from a major state water source. Farmers want water for their crops, major cities for their populations, and environmentalists for the delta and the San Francisco Bay to help support the fish — and not just the smelt — that live there.
But experts say this problem can’t just be solved by turning on a massive “faucet,” as Trump said last week. That’s in part because the demands on the system outstrip its supply and persistent drought can easily drain storage facilities.
While more than 9.5 million acre-feet of water could be delivered under contracts in the Central Valley Project — the major federal facility that works in tandem with the State Water Project — the agency delivers 6.8 million acre-feet of water in an average year, according to Congressional Research Service data.
The bulk of those flows, about 5 million acre-feet, go to farms, while just 800,000 acre-feet are set aside for wildlife needs, such as bolstering flows to improve habitat for fish at certain times of the year. The rest is split between cities, industry and other uses.
The State Water Project likewise delivers an average of 2.5 million acre-feet of water, when it holds contracts for nearly 4.2 million acre-feet. The bulk of those flows go to urban areas, while the remainder goes to agriculture.
There is also the substantial share of water that pours into the San Francisco Bay and then the Pacific Ocean, which can benefit fish and wildlife but is also critically important because it protects the delta from saltwater intrusion that could otherwise decimate the water supply.
Quite simply, everyone wants more water and there simply isn’t enough.
“The fact remains that delta smelt is a scapegoat,” said Peter Moyle, a biologist who has studied the fish since the 1970s and associate director of UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. “The problem is not going to go away because the smelt do.”
Federal and state officials added the fish to their endangered species listings in 1993, but the delta smelt’s population continued to dwindled, with no fish counted in surveys for the past six years. Earlier this year, California officials released 90,000 laboratory-raised fish into the delta in an experiment to determine how to achieve the best survival rates.
State and Biden administration officials are hustling to complete permanent rules on managing water in the region by the end of the year, in large part to have regulations in place ahead of Trump’s potential return to the White House.
Jeff Payne, the assistant general manager for Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest agricultural water district that receives a share of the Delta water, said his organization does support protection for native fisheries, but asserted that efforts to date have only caused shortages for farmers while failing to remedy the population decline.
“Flow-centric regulations that have been used in the past and are still used today are intended to protect these species but have failed to effect any measurable positive change in the status of our native fisheries while causing catastrophic effects on Central Valley agriculture,” Payne said in a statement provided to E&E News.
Deluge or drought
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta serves as a major water hub for California, providing water to about 30 million people and irrigating 6 million acres of farmland, stretching from Northern California into the delta and the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast and Southern California.
That includes water “exported” to other areas of the state via the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, which move water through a system of reservoirs, pumps and canals.
Battles over those flows have intensified in recent decades, as whiplash cycles of weather that range from intense drought to atmospheric rivers have upended water supplies shared by farmers, cities and the environment.
Trump’s deriding of the endangered fish began as a bid to sway Republican voters in California’s Central Valley during his first run for office — echoing promises by his then-rival for the GOP nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and following in a long line of Republican critics of the fish, such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), who targeted the smelt as “bait” as the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2008.
The reality-TV-personality-turned-politician opened his campaign against the delta smelt at a rally in Fresno, California, in 2016,telling the crowd: “There is no drought” in California, only a supply-line issue “because they send all the water out to the ocean.”
“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive, so that your job market will get better,” Trump said at the rally, which followed a meeting with farmers organized by a then-senior official for Westlands.
Trump — who would later tap former Westlands lobbyist David Bernhardt to become first the Interior deputy secretary and then secretary — did keep his pledge in early 2020 to shift priorities to farmers from the delta smelt and chinook salmon, inking a presidential memorandum and a record of decision finalizing biological opinions that govern water project operations in the state.
But that move drew immediate legal challenges from Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, forcing a series of court-mandated temporary plans while the federal government and state work on something more permanent.
Trump reiterated his California drought talking points in February in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, saying he has been told by an unnamed California lawmaker that the drought wasn’t what was keeping water from water users. “I said, ‘I see you have a drought.’ They said, ‘No, we don’t have a drought. We have so much water you don’t know what to do.’ But they send it out to the Pacific. We’re not going to let them get away with that any longer,” he said.
But California certainly has suffered from drought. Lack of precipitation in some years, most recently 2021 and 2022, meant there had to be cutbacks in releases because reservoirs don’t have sufficient water. And even in years with lots of rain, such as the storms caused by last year’s atmospheric rivers, there hasn’t been sufficient reservoir space to capture all of the downpours and keep the water flowing steadily.
That infrastructure shortfall is a major factor in the lack of consistency in the delta system, said Greg Gartrell, a former senior water official with the Contra Costa Water District. He pointed to the extremes of water supply between 2019 and 2021, when an overabundance turned to the lowest of flows.
“In 2019, it was a very wet year, and all the reservoirs were full in the spring. In 2021, everyone was complaining that they didn’t have water,” said Gartrell, who is currently an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
While three major facilities on the Sacramento River — the Shasta, Oroville and Folsom dams — can hold back a combined 9 million acre-feet of water, Gartrell said it’s simply not enough to contain flows in wet years.
“In the wetter years, most of the water that flows out is due to the inability to capture it,” he said.
Part of the problem is that those facilities must maintain about 2.5 million acre-feet of empty space to mediate precipitation. Without that space, cities and towns downstream of the dams could face severe floods.
While the state has plans to construct a new 1.5-million-acre-foot facility called the Sites Reservoir by 2033, Gartrell said that is still insufficient given a rising reliance on delta water as temperatures continue to rise under climate change.
Even if flows weren’t needed to protect endangered and threatened species like the delta smelt, the system simply doesn’t have the capacity to store sufficient water to all of its would-be users.
“If you really want to spend a lot of money, then we’d all have water,” he said.
In addition to water needed by farmers and major cities alike, however, the estuary needs its own dedicated flow of fresh water.
Without that water, known as an “outflow,” salt water could move upstream — more than 1,000 levees protect farmland that sits up to 25 feet below sea level — making water in the delta too brackish to drink or grow crops. Water with too much salt would also threaten the major water infrastructure projects that send water from the state’s wet north to its drier south.
To counter that risk, as much as 4.9 million acre-feet must be allowed to flow out of the system, which can account for as much as 25 percent of its flows in a dry year, according to researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California.
By comparison, the flows needed to protect the region’s ecosystem account for as little as 500,000 acre-feet in a dry year, to as much as 6.3 million acre-feet in a wet year, or about 10 percent of all available flows.
The outflows, however, also support migration and spawning of salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt and other species.
Fixing a struggling ecosystem
The dam and reservoir system that California relies on to distribute delta water down state — in some cases hundreds of miles away — created the environment where the delta smelt and other fish are struggling.
“The cost of keeping smelt populations viable is the result of years of building dams, levees, and other water infrastructure without providing adequate protections for native fishes,” said Moyle, the California biologist who has spent decades studying the fish.
He added that the impacts of moving water also takes a toll on longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, steelhead, and winter and spring-run chinook salmon. “The Delta smelt is just the first in the queue of declining fishes in the estuary, but is special because it a species found only in the estuary and requires a functioning estuary to survive in the long run,” he said.
In July, the Fish and Wildlife Service added the population of longfin smelt in the San Francisco Bay estuary to the list of endangered species, citing both climate change and “altered freshwater flows resulting from human activities” as crucial threats. For the second year in a row, California also prohibited commercial and recreational salmon fishing off the state’s coast, in large part because of the struggles of chinook salmon that originate in the Sacramento River.
But while Trump complains that California and federal agencies have favored fish over farmers and cities, environmentalists assert that not enough is being done to restore the health of the San Francisco Bay estuary and the waterways that feed it.
“The estuary is on the brink of collapse,” said Ashley Overhouse, a water policy adviser for the Defenders of Wildlife. “We are jeopardizing our water supply system.”
Overhouse characterized Trump’s repeated attacks on the delta smelt as “fairly far from reality,” and a way to attack bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
Instead, Overhouse said state and federal water managers need to focus on responding to the increased volatility of the state’s water supply, affected by higher temperatures and climate change shifting when and how much precipitation California receives.
“Now is a critical time for us to really consider both the impacts of the climate crisis and how we still guarantee a sustainable water supply,” she said.
Overhouse added that the state must focus on how to recharge its groundwater supplies and undertake large-scale recycling projects to make more of its resources, but that the agriculture industry must also take cuts. “We will need to retire a certain amount of land from large agricultural production,” she said.
In the meantime, both Newsom’s administration and the Bureau of Reclamation are crafting new strategies on how to better balance the delta’s water.
Reclamation is in the midst of creating a new long-term operating plan for the Central Valley Project, and published a draft plan in late July.
But environmentalists have criticized the proposal for embracing an option that indicated it could lead to the further decline of the longfin smelt, and potentially negatively affect additional species.
“The proposed new operations will frankly potentially be worse than the biological opinions and operations that came out in 2019 and 2020 under the Trump administration,” Overhouse said.
Environmental groups have likewise panned a central facet of Newsom’s effort, even as it aimed, in part, at curbing the potential impacts of a future Trump administration. The state has emphasized the creation of “voluntary agreements” under which water agencies would lower their water use and fund habitat conservation in exchange for ending flow restrictions to protect fish.
“The voluntary agreements really undercut the entire regulatory process by having inadequate water quality standards incorporated into their proposals,” Overhouse asserted.
But Westlands’ Payne touted the voluntary agreements as a way to protect the fisheries, and said his organization and other public water agencies are committed to reaching an accord.
“I note that our support for the Voluntary Agreements is based on a commitment to utilize the best available data and information and implement effective adaptive management. Our belief is that Voluntary Agreements are the best option for both the recovery of our native fish species and the stability of our water supply,” he said.
Defenders of Wildlife, along with Restore the Delta, San Francisco Baykeeper and other groups, also pushed back Wednesday against a Reclamation decision to end a program called “Fall X2” that boosts flows in the fall to improve delta smelt habitat.
The extra flows lower salinity levels, while increasing food sources and improving water temperatures.
“The situation of Delta Smelt is dire, and its record low population levels call for strong interventions by the state and federal agencies responsible for preventing its extinction,” the groups wrote in their letter.
Reclamation’s decision would end the annual program in October, rather than its typical September to November run.
The decision followed an August push by water contractors including Westlands, San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, and others to curtail the releases, which water officials said had proven to be ineffective.
