Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Washington state Democrat, sent a letter Friday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asking the Trump administration to cut red tape that she says has left fishermen and tribal communities defenseless against a sea lion population devouring salmon in the Columbia River.
The letter, first reported by the Washington Examiner, paints a picture of a federal regulatory process so cumbersome and expensive that it has rendered existing law nearly useless. Gluesenkamp Perez represents portions of Washington's Pacific coast, where the fishing industry is a lifeline, and where the predators in question are winning.
The numbers she cites are stark. 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.
Congress addressed the sea lion problem seven years ago. 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. The intent was clear: give managers the tools to protect endangered salmon runs from a booming predator population.
What happened next is a case study in how federal process can swallow federal purpose whole.
Gluesenkamp Perez reported that over the authorized period, only 111 sea lions of both species were actually removed, "nowhere near the permissible amount." The law said 716 could be killed. Barely 15 percent were. The gap between what Congress allowed and what the bureaucracy delivered is enormous.
The reason, according to the congresswoman's letter, is a removal process so layered with regulatory requirements that it borders on parody. She described the current procedure in detail:
"Manager 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 current regulatory process. For a single sea lion. That price tag alone explains why the authorized kill numbers were never reached. No local agency or fisheries manager can sustain those costs at scale, and the federal government apparently never stepped in to bridge the gap.
It is the kind of regulatory absurdity that Democrats rarely acknowledge, the gap between a law's promise and the administrative machinery that quietly suffocates it.
The letter makes two concrete requests of Secretary Lutnick. First, Gluesenkamp Perez asked the Commerce Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to partner with local governments and stakeholders to find ways to speed up the removal and euthanasia of sea lions. Second, she asked Lutnick to ease current restrictions on where sea lions can be removed along Washington's Columbia River.
The specific restrictions she wants loosened were not detailed in the reporting, but the thrust is plain: expand the geographic zones where managers can act and strip away some of the procedural layers that turned a straightforward wildlife-management authorization into a $38,000-per-animal ordeal.
Gluesenkamp Perez framed the stakes in economic and cultural terms. "The financial and cultural impacts are unsustainable," she wrote. The communities she represents, fishermen and tribal nations along the Columbia, depend on salmon runs that are being decimated not by overfishing or pollution but by a protected predator that the government authorized removing and then failed to remove.
The political dynamics here are unusual. A House Democrat is not filing a protest letter or staging a press conference to attack the administration. She is asking it for help. She is asking a Trump Cabinet secretary to use executive discretion to loosen environmental restrictions, the kind of request that typically comes from the Republican side of the aisle.
Gluesenkamp Perez has carved out a distinct lane in her caucus. She represents a district that leans conservative, and her willingness to appeal directly to the Trump administration on a resource-management issue sets her apart from colleagues who have spent their energy on impeachment articles and partisan confrontation.
Whether the Commerce Department responds, and how quickly, will say something about the administration's willingness to work across party lines when the ask aligns with its own deregulatory instincts. Cutting a $38,000 per-animal regulatory process is exactly the kind of government bloat the Trump administration has pledged to eliminate.
The letter also raises a broader question that neither party has answered well: what happens when one species protected by federal law threatens another species the government is also trying to save? Sea lion populations along the Pacific coast have rebounded dramatically under decades of federal protection. Salmon and steelhead runs have not. At some point, the regulatory framework has to choose, or at least allow the people closest to the problem to act.
That is what Gluesenkamp Perez is asking for. Not a wholesale rollback of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but a practical acknowledgment that the current process has failed on its own terms. Congress authorized 716 removals. Managers completed 111. The salmon kept disappearing. The sea lions kept eating.
The situation along the Columbia is a microcosm of a pattern that plays out across federal land and water management: Congress passes a law, the regulatory apparatus wraps it in procedure, costs balloon, timelines stretch, and the people who were supposed to benefit, in this case, fishermen and tribes, are left watching the problem get worse while the government congratulates itself on compliance.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in Congress have shown little interest in the kind of practical, ground-level governance that Gluesenkamp Perez's letter represents. The party's energy has been directed elsewhere, toward political confrontation, not toward the fishing communities watching their livelihoods disappear one salmon at a time.
The Columbia River's fishermen and tribal harvesters don't need another study or another five-year authorization window. They need a federal government willing to let them do what Congress already said they could do, minus the Toyota Corolla-sized price tag.
When it costs $38,000 and a licensed veterinarian to remove one sea lion from a river, the regulation isn't protecting anything. It's just protecting itself.