Government shutdown inflicts extra pain on Indian programs

Monday, October 14, 2013  

The shutdown of the federal government, coming on top of the sequestration of the budget, is hitting Indian Country particularly hard.

Programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service are already underfunded. Sequestration, in the form of across the board cuts, took its toll earlier this year and the shutdown has led to a second round of pain.

“You’re already looking at a good number of tribes who are considered the poorest of our nation’s people,” Jacqueline Pata, the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, told The New York Times. “When you are dealing with cutting off food supply programs and even nominal payments to tribal members, it creates a dangerous impact immediately.”

In many areas of Indian Country, the shutdown indeed represents a matter of life and death. A BIA employee on the Navajo Nation took dialysis patients to the hospital in a truck after receiving permission from Assistant Secretary Kevin Washburn.

"I'm not sure we had the authority to do that, but I'd rather get in trouble for doing something we don't technically have approval for than someone dying," Washburn, who remains on the job in Washington, D.C., in order to respond to critical situations, told Reuters.

President Barack Obama and leaders of both parties in Congress continue talks to end the shutdown and address another financial matter -- the U.S. debt limit.

Get the Story:
Pulling Aid Away, Shutdown Deepens Indians’ Distress (The New York Times 10/14)
Indian tribes struggle, and fume, as U.S. shutdown wears on (Reuters 10/12)

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