Federal Funding for Dam Removal in the United States

Dam removals can generate environmental benefits and, simultaneously, in the case of old and deficient dams, reduce safety problems. Finding money to pay for dam removal is a challenge, however. This Issue Brief describes federal government programs that are used to fund dam removal and some of their limitations and possibilities. The programs reside in the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), US Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). We also describe a federal partnership program led by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), which has provided funding in the Great Lakes region. Most of the programs target ecosystem restoration and fish passage, but two focus on rehabilitation of failing dams. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization partially funded by the federal government, also provides grants for dam removals. These grants are offered under different programs that have particular landscape, region, and species focuses. Funding is usually pulled together from a combination of corporate sponsors, FWS, US Forest Service, and philanthropic foundations. NFWF’s IDEA program uses mitigation funds and Natural Resource Damage (NRD) settlement funds, working with permitting agencies, permittees, and other stakeholders to disburse money for the benefit of impacted species, habitats, and resources. See https://www.nfwf.org/ for more information; we do not discuss NFWF further in this Issue Brief. Funding from mitigation and NRD is covered in a separate Issue Brief (Shabman and Stephenson 2020). We describe how these latter programs may have the potential to be used more for removals in particular circumstances, sometimes with modifications. This is one in a series of four RFF issue briefs on alternative funding approaches for dam removal. See Walls and Shabman (2020) for an introduction to the series.

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