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Friday, June 18, 2021
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Opinion
Editor & Publisher
Managing Editor
Joe Beach
Carl Sampson
opinions@capitalpress.com | CapitalPress.com/opinion
Our View
Food chain infrastructure must be secured
L
ike many people, we weren’t
aware until two weeks ago
that the nation’s meatpack-
ing industry was so technologically
sophisticated and dependent that it
could be hacked and shut down by
bad actors.
The apparent vulnerability in these
systems calls into question the secu-
rity of the food supply chain in the
United States — a clear and present
danger if we’ve ever heard one.
On May 31, JBS USA, a subsidi-
ary of JBS, the world’s largest meat
processing company, announced the
company had been hit by an “orga-
nized cybersecurity attack” over the
previous weekend.
According to the company’s state-
ment, JBS determined it was the tar-
get of a ransomware attack affecting
JBS
JBS USA’s beef processing facility in
Greeley, Colo. After a cyberattack, JBS
paid $11 million in ransom.
some servers in its North American
and Australian IT systems.
In response to the attack, JBS says
it took immediate action, suspending
all affected systems and calling on
third-party experts to help resolve the
problem. It also later admitted that it
paid $11 million in bitcoin to its sys-
tem’s captors.
The damage, however brief, was
real. Ranchers with regularly sched-
uled deliveries to JBS had to scram-
ble to sell their livestock to other
processors, at lower prices, and dis-
tributors with active orders had to
buy from other vendors at a pre-
mium. So, another case where
people selling live animals were
short-changed and people buying
processed product upstream had to
pay higher prices.
JBS isn’t the only large meat pro-
cessing company that depends on
computer technology, they all do.
The problem is magnified because
just a handful of companies control
most of the production.
The truth is that just about every-
thing in the food supply chain is con-
The Pacific Northwest
agrees — keep your
hands off our dams
Our View
here’s been a lot of
talk about our dams
over the last few
weeks, and I want to make
it abundantly clear: Any
“solution” for our salmon
population that includes
removing the dams on the
Lower Snake River is a
nonstarter.
Rep. Mike Simp-
son’s proposed Colum-
bia Basin Initiative seeks
to breach the Lower Snake
River dams in an attempt
at boosting the native
salmon population —
while ignoring the very
real issues, and solutions,
that are impacting our fish
populations.
Our native fish spe-
cies and the Lower Snake
River Dams can — and do
— coexist. In Washing-
ton, our dams along the
Snake and Columbia riv-
ers have fish passage rates
in the mid to upper 90 per-
centiles and utilize some
of the most state-of-the-
art fish passage technology
ever developed.
At the Ice Harbor Dam,
world-class scientists are
not only in the process of
replacing all of the dam’s
turbines with new fish-
safe technology, but they
are using this dam — one
of the four dams proposed
for breaching — to conduct
critical research on fish pas-
sage that will shape the way
the world builds and oper-
ates dams with the high-
est possible rates of fish
survival.
It’s not every day that
Gov. Jay Inslee and I agree,
but just recently the gov-
ernor and Sen. Patty Mur-
ray came out with a joint
statement rejecting Rep.
Simpson’s dam-breaching
proposal.
Unfortunately, with all
the hyperbolic rhetoric and
misinformation surround-
ing dams, it’s no wonder
that people are concerned. In
1999, several environmental
organizations put a full-page
ad in the New York Times
with the headline “Timeline
to Extinction: If we don’t
act, Snake River salmon will
disappear forever.” The ad
went on to claim that unless
the four Lower Snake River
dams were removed, wild
Snake River spring chinook
salmon would be extinct by
2017.
At the time, the numbers
did look ominous. During
that spring of 1999, only
3,296 Snake River spring
chinook passed the Lower
Granite Dam — the fourth
of the Lower Snake River
dams and the farthest east
they pass through before
they reach Idaho. Just
last year, in 2020, 23,380
Snake River spring chi-
T
Capital Press File
The Biden administration is writing a third version of regulations governing the waters of the U.S.
WOTUS once again
W
e have several problems with the
Biden administration’s plan to re-
write the Waters of the United States
rule.
The most important: the regulatory cycle the
folks in Washington, D.C., have created.
These days, many regulations are temporary.
A change of administration opens the door to
rewrite them in significant ways.
To us, this means the underlying laws are so
poorly written that anyone can do nearly anything
in the regulations putting them into effect.
The Clean Water Act and its progeny, WOTUS,
are the poster children of bad legislation.
Under the Clean Water Act, the federal gov-
ernment is supposed to protect the “waters of
the United States.” The question: What does that
mean?
Congress did not clearly define which waters
should be protected under the Clean Water Act.
Federal courts have disagreed over how to inter-
pret the law, and two previous administrations
have taken a crack at writing rules to carry it out.
Now the Biden administration is taking another
shot at it.
Good luck.
The problem is the Clean Water Act is so full
of ill-defined terms that lawyers, regulators and
judges can’t agree on what they mean. Instead of
Congress defining the terms, unelected bureau-
crats do it to fit the current administration’s
whims.
For example, after the U.S. Supreme Court
punted on the meaning of WOTUS, the Obama
administration included another fuzzy term in its
regulations — “significant nexus.” Those wiggle
words gave regulators the ability to claim nearly
any ponds, puddles, ditches or other bodies of
water were in some way connected to a stream,
trolled in one way or another by
computers, wonderfully useful tech-
nology that very few of the people
who use it really understand.
The more complicated the plumb-
ing, the easier it is to plug it up. The
incident with JBS demonstrates how
vulnerable vital infrastructure is to
hacking.
After the hack, Secretary of Agri-
culture Tom Vilsack said food chain
security was one of the things USDA
would address with its share of Presi-
dent Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure
proposal. We would hope so, but no
specifics were provided.
The federal government and the
companies that depend on computer
technology have to take security seri-
ously, and must make the necessary
investment to secure the infrastruc-
ture. If it is not safe, we are not safe.
river or lake and qualified as waters of the U.S.
Any nexus would be determined by bureau-
crats. That was bad enough, but the rules also
failed to provide a means of appealing a determi-
nation to the federal government.
That set off even more lawsuits.
The Trump administration tossed out the
Obama regulations and wrote its own, redefining
WOTUS.
Now the cycle continues. The Biden adminis-
tration will presumably toss out the Trump rules
and write new ones.
No one can predict when the cycle will end.
WOTUS demonstrates to us the poor quality of
work we are getting out of Congress. They issue
laws that are little more than concepts — “We
like clean water” — and leave it to bureaucrats to
fill in the blanks.
The Food Safety Modernization Act is another
example. Congress boldly legislated that “We
want to stop food poisoning” and left the details
to bureaucrats, who took more than a decade to
come up with hundreds of pages of rules, some of
which had nothing to do with food safety.
For example, we all remember one version that
required distillers grains — the leftovers from
brewing beer — to be treated like food instead
of as livestock feed. Luckily, then-Rep. Greg
Walden, R-Ore., intervened before the regulations
were finalized.
But this is what happens, and it’s why the fed-
eral government remains on a treadmill cycling
through politically inspired regulations meant to
implement poorly written laws.
At the very least, Congress should review new
regulations to make sure they follow the intent of
the law. Some state legislatures do that with regu-
lations, and Congress should, too.
It would do much to end the cycle of regula-
tions Congress now promotes.
GUEST
VIEW
Rep. Dan
Newhouse
nook passed that same
dam — a more than 700%
increase compared to 21
years prior.
Another oft-overlooked
facet of the issue is that
native salmon populations
started declining before
our dams were even built.
In fact, the state of Idaho
quite literally poisoned
many of their lakes sys-
tematically in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s to effec-
tively exterminate the spe-
cies and eliminate fish
runs. Today, Idaho’s dams
have no fish ladders,
meaning that they have
zero fish passage.
From the historic logging
practices that destroyed
spawning habitats to the
many predation challenges
our salmon face — be it
orcas or sea lions or avian
predators, it is no surprise
our salmon population is
struggling. Ocean condi-
tions, disease challenges
and the impacts of fishing
and harvesting also play a
role in the species’ survival
— not to mention the mil-
lions of gallons of raw sew-
age being dumped into the
Puget Sound each year.
All of these issues col-
lectively impact salmon
populations, and, based
upon the scientific infor-
mation stemming from
these actual impacts, the
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Adminis-
tration has already devel-
oped the strategic plans
to address these historic
impacts and the current
challenges facing the spe-
cies today. So why are
we trying to reinvent the
wheel when the guidebook
is already in our hands?
We know that dams
and fish can — and do
— coexist, and if we are
going to make real prog-
ress, we must focus on the
comprehensive plans we
have in place.
In Washington, our
dams provide us with
countless benefits — from
clean, renewable energy to
good-paying jobs, irrigation
and transportation of our
goods to market. Breaching
these four dams is not only
misguided, but it is danger-
ous — to our economy, to
our environment, and to our
way of life in the Pacific
Northwest.
Rep. Dan Newhouse is a
Republican member of the
U.S House from Washing-
ton state.