After Trump administration axes $500 million from Washington dam project, Patty Murray says she won’t let it happen again

WASHINGTON – The most fundamental job of Congress is to fund the government each year, typically through a bipartisan process that distributes dollars more or less evenly between red states and blue states. But a dustup over a dam construction project in Washington state has thrown a wrench into that process and raised the stakes of a government funding showdown in September.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has accused President Donald Trump’s administration of pulling $500 million that Congress allocated last year to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a fish passage project on the Green River, east of Tacoma. In a news conference at the Capitol alongside her fellow Democratic senators from Washington and California, Murray said that move undermines the trust lawmakers rely on to negotiate spending bills.

“Trump is robbing our states in broad daylight, and we are not going to be quiet about this,” Murray said. “President Trump is ripping up the road map that we all agreed on, even the House Republicans, and turning the Army Corps construction funds into his personal political slush fund.”

After Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed last year to appropriate the money for construction at Howard Hanson Dam, Trump shot down the bipartisan funding bill they had negotiated and Congress eventually passed a short-term funding bill, with the help of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a handful of other Democrats. Murray staunchly opposed that legislation, warning that its wording would give extraordinary leeway to the White House.

Her fears came to pass when Trump’s Office of Management and Budget – helmed by Russell Vought, a lead architect of the policy initiative known as Project 2025 – intervened to redirect Army Corps funding from states represented in the Senate by Democrats to those represented by Republicans.

As the Columbian of Vancouver, Washington, reported, an analysis by Murray’s office found that the Trump administration reallocated funds that were split roughly 50-50 between red and blue states so that only 33% of the money goes to states with two Democratic senators, while 64% goes to states with only GOP senators and 4% to “purple” states with one senator from each party.

In addition to zeroing out the funding for Howard Hanson Dam, the Trump administration cut overall funding for the Army Corps’ civil works projects by about $1.5 billion and slashed the Columbia River Fish Mitigation program – intended to reduce the impact of dams on salmon and steelhead runs – by nearly half.

In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, the Office of Management and Budget didn’t directly say what role it had played in redirecting Army Corps’ resources or why it had defunded the Howard Hanson Dam project. But the office said the new Army Corps work plan “will generate billions of dollars in economic activity by building American energy dominance and shipping capacity while investing in important conservation projects.”

“The available funds were allocated by the administration based on need and urgency, in accordance with the guidelines set by Congress,” the office said in a statement.

In a House subcommittee hearing on May 21, Army Corps official Robyn Colosimo confirmed that it was the Office of Management and Budget, and likely Vought , that made the decision to shift the money to red states.

The Army Corps didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Spokesman-Review, but a spokesman for the agency previously told the Columbian that the Columbia River Fish Mitigation funding is “an important source for many projects in the basin” and the Army Corps would “work with our partners in the region to prioritize projects depending on how much funding we actually receive from Congress.”

That proposition gets more complicated if the Trump administration, which has taken a maximalist view of executive power, can change how much money agencies receive from Congress. At the news conference, Murray said she intends to “explore every opportunity and every wording” as she crafts the language of the next funding bill “to make sure that we have funds protected.”

Congress has been historically unproductive this year, and the annual appropriations process is so far behind schedule that another short-term spending bill is the most realistic option to avert a government shutdown when the current stopgap bill expires at the end of September.

Even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, they need Democratic senators to help pass a spending bill. That gives Democrats some leverage to include language in the legislation to require that funds be spent as Congress directs, but it would require the party to be willing to let the government shut down. By choosing to help Republicans pass the partisan spending bill in March, Schumer may have squandered that leverage and encouraged the GOP to try the same move again.

If Murray can help it, she said, the government won’t operate under such an open-ended funding bill when the next fiscal year begins in October.