The Obama administration's plans to make hydroelectric dams along the Columbia and Snake rivers safer for salmon rely too much on vague promises to improve fish habitat and ultimately violate the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge said Tuesday.

In a stern ruling, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland ordered the federal government to go back and consider once again whether more aggressive actions — such as removal of four lower Snake River dams — are necessary to save more than a dozen runs of threatened and endangered fish.

A clearly frustrated Redden pointed out that the government has been in and out of his court for more than a decade fighting the same battle.

He said the Obama administration's short-term actions appear to help salmon until 2013. But after that, federal agencies predict they will achieve high rates of salmon recovery based on habitat-improvement projects that haven't been identified and for which there is no timetable — even as current projects fall behind schedule, lose funding or get canceled.

And even without those problems, the judge said he didn't see evidence that habitat projects, by themselves, would do enough to restore fish over the long run.

"The judge basically said, the agencies have been waving around this magic wand they call 'habitat improvements' and saying they hope that will be enough," said Glen Spain, with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "But he saw through that."

The judge left the plan in place through 2013 but ordered the government to return by January 2014 with a more aggressive long-term plan.

"I think it is fundamentally encouraging that the heart of his opinion was to find that the (recovery) plan is sound," Will Stelle, Northwest regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries told The Seattle Times. "I think it is a fundamentally constructive opinion.

Michael Milstein, a spokesman for the Bonneville Power Administration, said dam removal has always been listed as a possible fallback if other options did not achieve expected results.

"We have to look at what more he might be asking for," Milstein said. "It (dam removal) is already offered as a backup option."

Earthjustice attorney Todd True, who represented the conservation and fishing groups that challenged the government's so-called biological opinion, noted this is the third time Redden has rejected the government's attempt to say that the harm caused by the dams can be mitigated by improvements to habitat.

The judge is saying, "It is time to go in a new direction," True said. "We have been saying that for years. Hopefully the government will get the message now."

The dams have provided the West with cheap hydroelectric power for decades but are also a leading factor in the steady decline in populations of wild salmon.

Steven Hawley, author of "Recovering a Lost River: Restoring Rivers, Rewilding Salmon and Revitalizing Communities," said the majority of salmon mortality happens at the dams, rather than in the tributaries and estuaries where many restoration efforts are under way. But many Eastern Washington farmers and Washington's congressional delegation largely oppose any effort to remove the dams.

"Washington gets almost all the irrigation benefits from the dams and buys two-thirds of the electricity that dams produce, so the conventional wisdom in the state of Washington — for at least 30 years — has been 'don't mess with the status quo in the river,' " Hawley said.

Redden kept control of dam operations and made permanent his earlier orders to increase the amount of water spilled over dams to help young salmon migrating to the ocean in the spring and summer, rather than going through turbines.

The judge had particularly harsh words for the Bush administration, which abandoned a 2000 plan that acknowledged that breaching dams might ultimately be necessary.

The resulting Bush plan "was a cynical and transparent attempt to avoid responsibility for the decline of listed Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead," Redden wrote, adding that the government then "wasted several precious years."

U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, condemned the ruling, saying only Congress has authority to remove dams and added that such action would harm the region's economy.

AP environment writer Jeff Barnard and Seattle Times reporters Craig Welch and Hal Bernton contributed to this report.