Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife navigates budget cuts

Layoffs, a hatchery closure and reduced salmon and steelhead monitoring are all part of the new reality for Washington’s fish and wildlife agency as it navigates deep budget cuts ordered by state lawmakers.

Morgan Stinson, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s CFO, said in an interview Wednesday that roughly 120 positions were cut from the agency, with most of those being vacant jobs that will go unfilled. Twenty-nine layoffs were ordered as part of the cuts.

Meanwhile, a wide variety of the agency’s work will be curtailed, with limited staff remaining to do the work and restrictions on travel and other expenses.

This all comes as Washington hunters and anglers prepare for a punch in the wallet on Tuesday, when the cost of hunting and fishing licenses will jump by 38%.

The price hike was never going to be enough to stave off deep budget cuts for WDFW, however. A $16 billion budget shortfall prompted cuts across state government as lawmakers put together the state’s two-year budget this spring.

It also had them looking for new ways to raise revenue. In addition to hunting and fishing license fee hikes, lawmakers revived an additional fee for Columbia River salmon and steelhead anglers, raised the price of a Discover Pass and OK’d a $10 license plate fee that helps fund WDFW.

They were never going to find enough new money to avoid cuts, though, and a revenue projection released this past week signaled that things aren’t getting any better. Stinson said the forecast was down by about $1 billion, dampening any lingering hope that some of the agency’s cuts could be undone with a supplemental budget request during the 2026 Legislature.

“It’s going to continue to be a tough year,” Stinson said.

WDFW was forced to cut about $20 million, according to Stinson. Raising license fees gave the agency a slight lift – they were able to change how they paid for some work to stave off what may have been another $20 million in cuts.

WDFW Director Kelly Susewind laid out the specifics of the cuts in his email to staff earlier this month, going through each of the agency’s program areas.

A chunk of the cuts look like simple belt-tightening – limiting employee travel, reducing the number of vehicles in the motor pool fleet, slashing funds available for employee professional development.

Others will have a more noticeable impact on the average hunter or angler.

The fish program, which makes up about half the agency’s budget, took a major hit. Stinson said about 50 jobs were cut from the program.

A budget request for the agency’s Toutle and Skamania hatcheries in southwest Washington was cut in half, which will force the closure of the Skamania facility. The hatchery raised winter steelhead, and Susewind’s email said some of its operations will be moved elsewhere.

Funding for monitoring Puget Sound steelhead was cut, including money for managing the Skagit River catch-and-release steelhead fishery. That means that fishery won’t open next year.

The monitoring budget for other salmon and steelhead fisheries was also slashed, as was a program that tracked hatchery production. Staffing reductions will also slow the development of six Columbia River fishery management evaluation plans.

Elsewhere in the budget, the agency’s biodiversity program was cut by $2 million, which Susewind’s email says will impact conservation work on sturgeon and pinto abalone. Funding for work on stream barriers was cut, as was funding for maintaining lands the agency manages.

The agency’s enforcement division will be forced to leave positions open throughout the biennium, and will have to delay the purchase of new equipment.

There will be less money to manage wildlife diseases like chronic wasting disease, which was found for the first time in the state last August near Spokane.

The program responsible for stocking pheasants in Western Washington is also on the chopping block, though not immediately. That cut is scheduled to hit during the second fiscal year of the biennium.

When it does, it likely means the agency will end up closing the Bob Oke Game Farm in Centralia, which raises the pheasants that are stocked for the program.

Stinson said that was the only cut delayed to the second fiscal year of the biennium. The rest apply for the fiscal year that begins on Tuesday.

Close observers of WDFW and the Legislature saw much of this coming, and some were quick to offer support for license fee increases – even though the bill wasn’t requested by WDFW.

Alexei Calambokidis, the Washington state policy lead for Trout Unlimited, said the cuts to WDFW hurt, but that he thinks things could have been much worse.

“In my mind, we snuck out of (the Legislature) without having to make as bad of cuts as we probably would have had to,” Calambokidis said.

It also comes at a time of major uncertainty within the federal government. Much of WDFW’s work is done alongside their counterparts at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and both agencies have faced federal budget cuts.

Calambokidis said WDFW’s cuts mean the agency will have less capacity to fill in any gaps left by federal agencies backing off in one work area or another.

He was among those who hoped the next legislative session might give WDFW a chance to recover some of what it lost. But given the most recent revenue forecast, he’s not optimistic.

“There’s not relief coming,” he said.