December 8, 2025 — The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources took on the Columbia River’s salmon-eating sea lion problem in a nearly 2½-hour hearing Wednesday.
After establishing the scale of the sea lion population explosion around the Pacific Northwest, the meeting looked at the effectiveness of legislative efforts to address the problem — mostly centering around killing them.
The killings had largely faded from controversy as other proposed solutions to salmon extinction have floundered, leaving sea lions as an obvious target. That culminated earlier this year when the federal permit that allows Northwest states and some Native nations to trap and kill sea lions in the Columbia River was reapproved without almost any opposition.
The reapproved permit allowed hundreds of sea lions that weren’t killed under a 2020 approval to be killed by 2030. During the hearing, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, questioned why more of the 716 that were initially approved to be killed had not been.