Abstract: This broadcast provides a preliminary analysis of the President’s fiscal year (FY) 2018 budget request, highlighting impacts on funding for Indian programs. Appropriations committees have already held hearings on the outline of the proposals. NCAI urges tribal leaders to review the proposals in the President’s budget and voice support for tribal programs with direct communication to the Appropriations Committee and Subcommittee leadership and members in both the House and Senate.
With the release of the President’s FY 2018 budget, Congress faces a choice on how to fund discretionary programs: (1) continue to provide partial relief from the 2011 Budget Control Act’s (BCA) sequester, (2) allow sequestration to take full effect for the first time, or (3) significantly deepen sequester cuts to non-defense programs while eliminating it for defense as proposed in the President’s budget.
In addition to the Interior Appropriations Committees, we encourage tribes to send testimony and meet with members of all the Appropriations Committees, such as the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee, the Housing and Urban Development budget in the Transportation-Housing subcommittees, and energy programs in the Energy-Water subcommittees, for instance.
See this budget advocacy toolkit for more information. Contact Amber Ebarb (aebarb@ncai.org or 202-466-7767) at NCAI if you have questions about this analysis.