American Indian and Alaska Native Public Witness Day 3
House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies
2025-02-27
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Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
The committee will come to order. Good morning and welcome to the third and final day of our public witness hearings for American Indians and Alaska Native programs. I'd like to welcome all the distinguished tribal elders and leaders and thank our witnesses for appearing before the committee to share their concerns on these important topics. This year we had an unprecedented number of requests requiring us to expand to a third day to accommodate nearly 100 tribes and tribal organizations. These hearings are incredibly important, so we appreciate everyone's flexibility so that we could hear from so many tribes and organizations across Indian country. In terms of hearing logistics, I will call each panel of witnesses to the table, one panel at a time. Each witness will have five minutes to present their testimony. The full written testimony will be included in the record, and as I've said every time I've read this is, believe it or not, we actually do read the testimony that you submit to us. It is important to us. But your full written testimony will be included in the record, so please don't feel pressured to cover everything in five minutes. We will be using a timer to track the progress of each witness. When the lights turn yellow, the witness will have one minute remaining to conclude their remarks. When the lights turn red, I will ask the witness to stop to remain on schedule. We'll hear from every witness on each panel before members will be provided an opportunity to ask questions.
Because we have a full day ahead, I request that we try to keep things moving so that we can stay on schedule and respect everybody's time. It looks like we are scheduled to have votes this morning at around 10.30 or something like that. Around 10.20. And it's only one vote, so we will have to adjourn for a few minutes to run over and vote and come back, which will, again, put us further behind. But that's okay. So I say we plan to briefly recess to allow members to vote and then resume the panel when members return. I also want to note the committee rules prohibit the use of outside cameras and audio equipment during these hearings. The hearings can be viewed in its entirety on the committee's website and an official hearing transcript will be available at GPO.gov. I'm happy to yield to my ranking member for any remarks she might wish to make. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you again for holding three days of these witness hearings. They're so valuable to us.
Thank you to everybody who's here today, and I know you've all traveled from long distances, so we appreciate that very much. I just want to say a few things. The Trump administration has only been in office a few short weeks, yet they have unleashed chaos and disruption into indigenous communities and created anxiety and uncertainty for tribal members over their employment status, the continuation of critical health care and educational services, and in some cases have even challenged their citizenship. I hope our witnesses today will use this hearing as an opportunity to sound the alarm on the devastating impacts of this administration's policies. I hope you will shine a much needed spotlight on the damaging impacts that the freeze on federal funding, the termination of probationary employees, and the federal hiring freeze have already had and will have on the lives and the livelihoods of tribal nations and indigenous communities across the country. The testimony over the last two days has provided us with a lot of important information, and I look forward to hearing and learning more about what is happening in your communities, the needs and challenges facing Indian country, and your priorities in the interior bill. This discussion will allow your voices to be heard and will help inform us as we finish, hopefully, the fiscal year 2025 bill and then begin developing the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill. With that, again, I thank Chair Simpson and yield back. Thank you.
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Unknown (SPEAKER_08)
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Unknown (SPEAKER_25)
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