Navajo Nation Washington Office

Yá'át'ééh!

As budget conversations are underway, we kindly remind Navajo leaders of the upcoming TIBC meeting scheduled next week. This is a great opportunity for tribal leaders to engage with federal entities, advocate for funding needs, and discuss concerns and questions regarding the FY2022 & FY2023 budgets for a great number of programs serving Indian Country.

This week, NNWO organized a presentation by ActivePure to introduce air filtration technology to the Navajo Nation - technology that will soon be installed and utilized in all Navajo Casinos and hotel rooms. In this week's newsletter, we cover this meeting in addition to the recent reconciliation bill which has been penned to increase the taxes of major cooperations and the small percentage of extremely wealthy Americans in the United States.

It is always our pleasure to provide our readers with recent events in the Washington, DC area. We look forward to providing you with more updates on the TIBC meeting.

With that, I wish you and yours wonderful weekend. Please stay safe. 

Best regards,

Santee Lewis

National Congress of American Indians Plans to Host Upcoming Tribal/Interior Budget Council Meeting

Photo Courtesy of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development - Flickr Account

The Department of Interior (DOI) plays a vital role in meeting and carrying out federal trust responsibilities that impact all 574 federally recognized tribes and their citizens nationwide. To ensure the Indian Affairs (IA) budget favors Indian programs, DOI provides a forum for tribes and federal officials to work together in developing an annual budget request. The Tribal/Interior Budget Council (TIBC) is a week-long tribal consultation session aimed at formulating each year's budget that fund IA programs. DOI established the meeting in 1999 to help tribal governments to participate in the planning of the IA budget and to include tribal representatives from each of the 12 IA regions. There are three TIBC meetings (spring, summer, and winter) each year with their summer meeting occurring in Indian Country.

The last TIBC meeting that DOI conducted was on June 7 – 11, 2021. Under a contractual agreement between DOI and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), NCAI hosts these meeting with the next TBIC Meeting virtually on September 21 – 22, 2021. The upcoming TIBC meeting will also provide guidance on developing a budget that allows tribal self-determination, sovereignty, fulfills treaty rights, and addresses the needs of tribes. NCAI’s website offers additional information on the meeting agenda and the Indian Affairs Manual, highlighting the Distributions of Resources. The TBIC meeting also serves as an educational forum on the budget process and advice from Indian Country on government-to-government interactions.

Photo courtesy of Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise

Will Reconciliation Depend on Tax Rates?

Photo Courtesy of The White House - Flickr Account

Everybody in Washington is asking the same thing: what’s going into the reconciliation bill? Unfortunately, the answer is that we still don’t know.

Democratic leadership put forth plans to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, giving the middle class a tax cut. This will create an investment of $3.5 trillion in American families and the environment; in the form of free community college, extending child tax credits, and fighting climate change. But dissent within the Democratic Party could derail the plan.

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has questioned Democratic leadership, saying the math doesn’t add up. The Administration has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, which would create an effective rate ranging from 28% to 36.6% with an average rate of 32.34% when state-corporate taxes are added to the mix. This is on top of payroll tax contributions that corporations have to match for their employees. The United States already charges a higher corporate tax rate than the average for OECD countries. If the rate gets too high, some corporations may move to cheaper jurisdictions like Canada or Europe, taking jobs and tax revenues with them.

Senator Manchin still wants to raise the corporate tax rate. He believes a more reasonable rate—closer to 25%—will keep the United States competitive internationally while reducing the amount the federal government can afford to spend from $3.5 trillion to $1.5 trillion or maybe $2 trillion. After Senator Manchin appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday morning, the White House began to push back to reclaim the narrative, including a Thursday speech by President Biden. President Biden focused his comments on the benefits his Build Back Better plan would provide to the American people, arguing that the extremely wealthy need to “pay their fair share.”

In his address, President Biden also defended a proposed rule that would require banks to report all transactions to the IRS for accounts with more than $600 in a year as a way to identify fraud and collect unpaid taxes from the wealthiest Americans. He also pointed out that 55 of the most profitable companies in America paid $0 in federal income tax. What he failed to mention is that there is no claim that these corporations violated the law, but legally spread losses over time, deferred taxes through capital depreciation, and took advantage of tax incentives programs, including those included in President Biden’s CARES Act. Finally, President Biden responded to criticisms over his COVID vaccine mandates.

Despite the back and forth within the Democratic Party, Congressional leadership is determined to pass something under reconciliation. The federal fiscal year ends on September 30th, and without the reconciliation package, the government will likely have to rely on continuing resolutions until a bill is passed, as is frequently the case. The question is, where will a compromise be struck on the final amount. With the House still waiting to hold a vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill championed by Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema (D-AZ), a compromise may be possible sooner. Still, it seems unlikely that they’ll make the October 1st deadline based on the distance between the two positions.

RECA Update

Photo Courtesy of Environmental Protection Agency

On September 16th, the 24th Navajo Nation Council Delegate and Chair of the Naabik'iyati' Sexual Assault Prevention Subcommittee, Amber Kanazahbah Crotty, requested a teleconference to obtain an update on the efforts supporting the reintroduction of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) Amendments of 2021. Navajo Nation Washington Office (NNWO) participated in this call, including the Navajo Department of Health (Uranium Workers' Program), Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, and the newly hired lobbyist, Hobbs Straus Dean & Walker LLP.

NNWO informed the RECA workgroup that Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) have yet to introduce the RECA Amendments of 2021 in a few weeks. The Navajo Nation RECA workgroup will continue to work with both Chambers to coordinate the simultaneous introduction of the proposed amendments. The 116th Congress, unfortunately, did not act on S.947 (or its companion, H.R.3783), a bill to amend RECA to improve compensation for workers involved in uranium mining and for other purposes. Now that the summer recess is over, Congress expects to reintroduce the RECA Amendments during the 117th Congress.

Once the RECA Amendments are introduced, the proposed legislation will need to be presented to its respective oversight Committees, Senate Judiciary Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee. The NNWO and the lobbyist plan to expedite the passage of this bill by drafting and sending letters to members of the Senate and House requesting their support. Along with these activities, the NNWO and the RECA workgroup continue to hold bi-weekly teleconference calls. The next teleconference is scheduled for September 30th.  

Government and Legislative Affairs Association - Position Open