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

The Trump administration on Tuesday moved to weaken protections for a threatened California fish, a change that would allow large amounts of water to be diverted from the San Francisco Bay Delta to irrigate arid farmland and could harm the region’s fragile ecosystem. The plan, which administration officials expect to be finalized in January, is a major victory for a wealthy group of California farmers that had lobbied to weaken protections on the fish, the delta smelt. It also might intensify ethics questions about Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who was the lobbyist for those farmers until just months before he joined the Trump administration. Federal investigators are looking into whether Mr. Bernhardt’s efforts at the Interior Department to weaken protections for the fish violated “revolving-door” rules designed to prevent former lobbyists from helping past clients from within the government. Investigators also are looking into whether he improperly continued lobbying for those farmers even after he de-registered as a lobbyist just before joining the Trump administration.The delta smelt, an unassuming, finger-size fish with little utility beyond its role as an environmental sentry, has been at the center of California’s water wars for nearly three decades. The “biological opinion” — released jointly on Tuesday by the Interior Department and the Commerce Department — reverses scientific findings made a decade ago, which granted Endangered Species Act protections for certain types of West Coast salmon and the smelt...MORE