Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat representing portions of Washington's Pacific coast, sent a letter Friday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking the Trump administration to cut red tape that she says is preventing the timely removal of sea lions devouring salmon in the Columbia River. The request puts a blue-district lawmaker in the unusual position of asking a Republican administration to relax environmental restrictions, and for good reason.
The numbers Perez laid out are hard to ignore. Sea lions, she wrote, "have eaten four times as many salmon as our fishermen and Tribes have harvested in the Columbia River in a year." During the 2025 spring season alone, nearly one-fourth of fish arriving at Bonneville Dam showed wounds from sea lion bites. Fishermen and tribal communities who depend on those runs are watching their livelihoods get chewed up, literally, while a federal bureaucracy moves at a pace that would embarrass a glacier.
Perez directed her appeal to both the Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asking them to partner with local governments and stakeholders to speed up the removal and euthanasia of problem sea lions. She also asked Lutnick specifically to ease current restrictions on where sea lions can be removed along Washington's stretch of the Columbia River, as the Washington Examiner reported.
Congress already tried to address this problem. The 2018 Marine Mammal Protection Act authorized the killing of at least 540 California sea lions and 176 Steller sea lions from the Columbia River over a five-year period. That is not a small number. But Perez noted that only 111 sea lions of both species have actually been removed, "nowhere near the permissible amount."
The gap between what the law allows and what regulators have accomplished tells you everything about how federal process can strangle federal intent.
Perez described the current removal procedure in terms that read like dark comedy. A manager, she wrote, "must capture these Toyota Corolla-sized creatures in traps, remove them from the river, chemically euthanize them with darts with a licensed veterinarian present, then transport the carcasses to a tertiary location for disposal and autopsy." Each removal can cost nearly $38,000 under the existing regulatory framework.
At that price tag and that pace, the federal government has managed to remove roughly one sea lion for every six it was authorized to take out. Meanwhile, the animals keep feeding.
The people paying the price are not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. They are commercial fishermen, sport anglers, and tribal communities along the Columbia River whose harvests and cultural traditions depend on healthy salmon and steelhead runs. Gluesenkamp Perez, who has shown a willingness to break with her own party when the situation demands it, framed the issue bluntly.
"The financial and cultural impacts are unsustainable."
That single sentence carries more weight than most congressional letters manage in five pages. When sea lions consume four times more salmon than every fisherman and tribe on the river combined, "unsustainable" is an understatement. The salmon don't come back. The fishing seasons get shorter. The tribal treaty rights that depend on those fish become hollow promises.
This is a case where the federal government already identified a problem, already passed a law to address it, and then wrapped the solution in so much procedural padding that the problem got worse. That pattern will be familiar to anyone who has watched Washington try to manage anything, from FEMA funds to forest management to border enforcement.
The congresswoman's letter makes two concrete requests. First, she wants the Commerce Department and NOAA to work with local governments and stakeholders to find faster methods of removing sea lions. Second, she wants the geographic restrictions loosened so that removals are not limited to a narrow stretch of the Columbia, as the Washington Examiner detailed.
Neither request is radical. Congress already decided these animals could be lethally removed. Perez is simply asking the executive branch to carry out the law with something approaching competence.
The letter does not specify which local governments or stakeholders Perez wants brought into the process, and it does not lay out exactly which geographic restrictions she considers most burdensome. Those details will matter as the Commerce Department decides whether to act. Lutnick has not publicly responded.
There is something clarifying about a Democrat asking a Republican administration to loosen environmental restrictions. It suggests the problem is real enough to override partisan reflex. Gluesenkamp Perez represents a swing district, and she has shown before that she is willing to put constituent interests ahead of party orthodoxy, including when she joined calls for accountability against a fellow Democrat facing an ethics scandal.
The question now is whether the Trump administration will move. The facts on the ground argue for action. A law already on the books authorizes the removal of more than 700 sea lions. Fewer than 111 have been taken out. The cost per animal is approaching $38,000. Fish are showing up at Bonneville Dam with bite marks. And the people who fish the Columbia, families, small businesses, sovereign tribes, are watching the resource disappear.
This is not a close call. The regulatory apparatus that was supposed to manage a wildlife conflict has instead managed to protect the predator at the expense of the people and the prey species everyone agrees need saving. The 2018 law gave the government the authority. Six-plus years later, barely a fraction of the authorized removals have happened.
If the Commerce Department needs a Democrat from Washington State to remind it that laws are meant to be executed, not just filed, that tells you something about the broader problem of institutional accountability in the federal government.
When a Toyota Corolla-sized sea lion eats more salmon than every fisherman on the river, and the government's answer is a $38,000 veterinarian-supervised removal process, the system is not protecting anyone. It is just protecting itself.
