Published by Klamath Basin Crisis .org 6 May 2026 at
https://klamathbasincrisis.org/litigation/2026/EndOfKlamathProjectUnderTrump_EarthJusticeAmyCordalis050626.htm
www.klamathbasincrisis.org — A Voice for Klamath River Basin Families, Wildlife, and the Future of the Klamath Project
This Could Be the End of the Klamath Project Under the Trump Administration — At the Hand of Earthjustice and Amy Cordalis
We warned ourselves about this eight months ago. We told each other it was coming. And on May 5, 2026, it came — exactly as predicted, from exactly the same lawyers, on exactly the same playbook. This time, the target is not just our farms. It is one of the Trump administration’s most consequential Western water decisions, and Earthjustice is asking the same federal judge in California to throw it out before this water year ends.
Amy Cordalis, the former Yurok Tribe attorney who has built a career and FAME on suing the Klamath Project, and Patti Goldman of Earthjustice — the same Patti Goldman who has been filing these cases against our families and communities for over two decades — moved in federal court in San Francisco to throw out the entire 2026 Annual Operations Plan. Right in the middle of irrigation season. With our crops already in the ground. And right on top of the Trump administration’s May 2025 legal reset, which finally restored the rule of contract in this basin after thirty years of erosion and continued lawfare.
This is the tenth lawsuit in twenty-five years. Same lawyers. Same court. Same season. Same families left to absorb the loss.
Klamath Irrigation District has been educating the Trump Administration on Groundhog Day Lawfare — a repetitive, predictable, calculated attempt to harm the Pacific Flyway, ecosystem, our farmers, our refuges, our communities, our culture, and our economy by creating “waiting waste” through the courts. The wait is the weapon. Every year a family does not know if the water is coming, ground is lost that cannot be recovered. Every season under a cloud is a season a young farmer decides not to take over from his father. Every cycle thins out the basin a little more, exactly the way it was designed to.
And this time, they may finish the job — by undoing the only federal action in a generation that has tried to stop them.
What the Trump Administration Actually Did — And Why Earthjustice Is Panicking
In May 2025, the Department of the Interior under Secretary Doug Burgum issued an Updated Analysis from the Solicitor’s Office that reset the legal framework governing how Reclamation operates the Klamath Project. In January 2026, Reclamation followed with its own Reassessment Report. Together, those two documents do something that has not happened in three decades: they put the irrigation contracts back where the law actually places them — as binding federal commitments that cannot be wished away to satisfy ESA flow demands the basin and watershed physically cannot meet.
This was not a radical action. It was a return to the plain text of the 1902 Reclamation Act, the 1905 Klamath Project authorization, and a century of contract law. It restored what every farmer in this basin has known all along: a contract is a contract. Water deliveries to the Klamath Project are not optional, nor opinion-based, and they are not subordinate to flow targets manufactured by Interior advisors operating completely outside the law.
The Updated Analysis is the most important federal action affecting this basin in twenty plus years. And Earthjustice knows it. That is why their motion does not just challenge the 2026 Operations Plan. It asks Judge Orrick to declare the May 2025 Updated Analysis and the January 2026 Reassessment unlawful and vacate them. They are not trying to win a single water year. They are trying to wipe out the Trump administration’s Klamath policy entirely, before any future Section 7 consultation can ever rely on it.
What Cordalis and Goldman Are Asking the Court to Do
The motion is set for hearing June 10, 2026, before Judge William Orrick — the same judge who has ruled in Earthjustice’s favor before. The Tribe has signaled it intends to file for summary judgment shortly after June 12, with the open intent of getting the case decided before this water year ends — and before the Trump administration can defend its policy on a normal litigation timeline.
First, Cordalis and Goldman want the court to declare unlawful the Department of Interior Solicitor’s May 2025 Updated Analysis and Reclamation’s January 2026 Reassessment Report. These are the documents that finally put on paper what every farmer in this basin has known for a hundred years. Earthjustice wants those documents wiped off the books before they ever get used in a single Section 7 consultation. If they win, the Trump administration’s Klamath reset is a dead letter on arrival.
Second, they want Judge Orrick to vacate the entire 2026 Annual Operations Plan, including the 221,000 acre-foot agricultural allocation announced on April 6. If they win, the Drought Response Agency, the contractors, and every family who has already planted are operating on a number that no longer governs the season. Mid-water-year. After every operational decision has been made.
Right now, today, more than 1,000 cubic feet per second is rolling over Keno Dam. Inflows to Upper Klamath Lake are running about 910 cfs. The river below Keno is already getting more water than is naturally coming in. The lawsuit asks for more. It asks for water that does not exist except in the wettest one-in-three years on record, based on Hardy Flow numbers cooked up by Clinton-Obama-Biden Interior advisors that have never matched the actual hydrology of this basin.
The Real Body Count Earthjustice Will Not Talk About
Earthjustice puts coho salmon on its fundraising page and calls itself a champion of fish. Let us talk about the fish and the birds Earthjustice does not raise money for.
When water gets diverted away from the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuges to satisfy Earthjustice’s demands for downstream flows, the refuge wetlands shrink. When wetlands shrink and warm, avian botulism — Clostridium botulinum type C — explodes through the duck and goose populations of the Pacific Flyway. Every year we have buried tens of thousands of birds in this basin from botulism outbreaks driven by exactly the water management Earthjustice keeps demanding. We have watched mallards, pintails, and shovelers convulse and drown in inches of stagnant, oxygen-starved water that should have been flushed and refreshed. We have seen the endangered fish that live in our refuges — the very species the ESA is supposed to protect — die in the same water.
These are federal wildlife refuges. They sit on the Pacific Flyway, the largest migratory bird corridor in North America. They are among the most ecologically important wetlands on the continent. And they are starved every year while Earthjustice argues in court that more water must go past them, down the river, to Hardy Flow numbers that exceed what the watershed produces.
Amy Cordalis and Patti Goldman do not file lawsuits for the birds in our refuges. They do not file lawsuits for the fish in our refuges. They file lawsuits for one species, in one stretch of one river, and they let everything else in this basin die to make their point. The Trump administration’s reset is the first federal action that even acknowledges this trade-off honestly — which is precisely why it has to be killed before it can be used to defend a refuge water allocation.
The Ninth Circuit Front Has Been Open for Two Years
While Cordalis and Goldman open this new attack at the trial court, their old attack is still pending. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Yurok Tribe v. Bureau of Reclamation on June 12, 2024 — the appeal of Judge Orrick’s 2023 ruling on stored water. Twenty-three months later, that panel still has not ruled. The water is the weapon.
In September 2025, the Ninth Circuit declined to dismiss the appeal as moot, holding that the underlying question — whether the ESA can override our adjudicated water rights — remains live. So Earthjustice is now fighting on two fronts at once. They appeal what they lose. They sue again on what they have already won. They do not stop. They were never going to stop. And our farms wait, and wait, and wait, and the wait itself is what kills us.
The Trump administration’s Department of Justice will be the team defending the May 2025 Updated Analysis in court. Earthjustice has timed this attack to land before that defense can fully mature, before Reclamation can apply the Updated Analysis in a single completed Section 7 consultation, and before any appellate court can rule on the broader question. This is a deliberate effort to deny the new administration the chance to put its policy on the ground and analyze the improvements before a friendly judge wipes it out.
Cordalis and Goldman’s Vision of the Future of Klamath and Modoc Counties
Strip away the legal jargon and read what they are actually asking for in plain English:
That is not a slippery-slope argument. That is a description of what is in their motion papers. Read them. They want the 2026 allocation thrown out. They want the contracts declared subordinate to ESA flows that the basin physically cannot provide. They want every future operations plan written from the assumption that contract deliveries are the last priority, not the first. And they want the Trump administration’s Updated Analysis vacated so no future Reclamation policy can ever lean on it. They have spent thirty years building the legal scaffolding to get exactly this outcome, and now they are asking a friendly judge to put the keystone in.
If Judge Orrick gives them what they want, the Klamath Project as we have known it for 120 years is over — and the new administration’s signature Western water policy is dead before it ever moved a single acre-foot. Not in some distant theoretical future. This year. With this ruling. With these crops already in the ground.
What We Are Asking Of the Trump Administration
To President Trump, to Secretary Burgum, to Acting Commissioner Cameron, to Acting Solicitor of the Interior, to the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, and to the Western delegation in Congress: this is your fight as much as it is ours. We all share the benefits.
The May 2025 Updated Analysis is your policy. The January 2026 Reassessment is your policy. The 221,000 acre-foot allocation announced April 6 is your policy. Every one of those decisions is now in the crosshairs of a motion designed to be heard, ruled on, and appealed before this water year ends — before your administration has had a single full irrigation season to demonstrate that the rule of contract can be restored to a Western reclamation project without ecological catastrophe.
This is not litigation. It is a strategy for the deliberate dismantling of an entire federal reclamation project and the rural communities built around it — timed to land at the moment a new administration is most exposed. Earthjustice files the same pre-suit notice every time Reclamation issues a plan they do not like. They file in the Northern District of California, where they have a favorable judge. They stack procedural and substantive ESA claims so we have to win every one. They time every filing to coincide with the irrigation allocation. They cite each prior ruling as “settled law” against the next plan. They coordinate with the Tribe, with commercial fishermen, and with environmental nonprofits so the case looks bigger than it is.
We are not the villains in this story. We are the people, and military veterans, who built the canals, who feed the country, who steward the refuges that shelter the Pacific Flyway, who pay the property taxes that keep the schools open, and who are now being told by lawyers in Seattle and San Francisco that none of that matters because of one fish in one river.
Earthjustice wants the Klamath Project to end. Amy Cordalis has said as much in her own words, in her own interviews, for over a decade. The only question left is whether the Trump administration — its Department of Justice, its Department of the Interior, and its allies in Congress — will fight for the policy reset they have already issued, or whether they will let a federal judge in California undo it on a sixty-day timeline that nobody outside Earthjustice’s office building got to set.
One season. One season where the families who feed this country, the refuges that shelter the flyway, and the fish in our own waters are not held hostage to a sixty-day notice and a friendly judge. One season for the Trump administration to prove that its Klamath policy is real, defensible, and durable.
That is all we are asking. And it is more than this basin has been given in twenty-five years.
