The Government Accountability Office concluded that federal agencies imposed complex criteria and deadlines on applications for pandemic aid that may have overwhelmed small agencies, including tribal governments. Nickolaus Lewis, Lummi Nation council member and chairman of the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, said those rules made it more difficult to apply for help.
“There are times when the federal government will say, ‘We’re going to provide assistance,’” Lewis said, “but then they put so many barriers or policies or red tape around a dollar that it’s almost unusable.”
Luke Strong-Cvetich, the tribal planning director for the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, said nations do not have the same administrative capacity to access funding as state-level agencies. The abundance of funding opportunities made access difficult, let alone determining eligibility and reporting requirements.
“The sheer amount of opportunities that were available surpassed any tribe’s capacity,” he said. “It was a firehose of funding at every level, including for tribal governments.”
The GAO report also identified weaknesses in the ways several programs rolled out funding to nations, or failed to match aid to the needs of tribal operations.
Early in the pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Treasury faced an urgent deadline to distribute $150 billion in federal aid as part of the CARES Act. The agency had until the end of April 2020, and they did it for most eligible entities, including cities, states and territories. In fact, they made it in time for every eligible recipient except tribal governments.
Getting the allotted $8 billion in aid to Indigenous nations took another seven weeks – with most funding distributed by June 17, 2020, nearly two months longer than to other recipients.
The Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program also originally excluded gaming businesses, which are a large source of employment for many nations. According to the report, the SBA did not consult with tribal leaders until 11 days after the agency started accepting applications and only after tribal leaders asked for a consultation. The agency also didn’t update the eligibility requirements until after the first wave of funding – totaling $349 billion – was exhausted.
The Treasury department also used tribal population data from Housing and Urban Development to determine the funding amounts, rather than using enrollment data provided by nations themselves. The Treasury later acknowledged that the data could be insufficient, including for nations that provide assistance to members who live outside the areas counted and for nations without a land base whose population would appear in the data as zero.
(In November 2023, the Treasury updated its tribal consultation policy, stating that the agency will consult with tribal officials before implementing policies that have tribal implications, including any use of data. The policy also included more transparency for nations into the decision process following consultations.)
For Lewis, one of the biggest issues is a lack of tribal knowledge or experience working with nations.
“People in the federal government or the state government or the county government, they don’t understand the tribes,” he said. “That I think is one of the biggest struggles that I’ve experienced is that we have to continuously reeducate people that we have to work with.”
Anna Maria Ortiz, a Government Accountability Office director focused on tribal issues, noted the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic also compounded the difficulty of navigating program requirements.
“When you had this relief coming in the door, and you had people out sick. People grieving loved ones. People taking care of others,” she said. “Now you have more relief funds coming in, but extra requirements.”
For chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson of the Colville Business Council, the governing body of the Confederated Colville Tribes, part of the burden was shifting the nation’s normal functions to follow public health protocols while applying for funds. That meant they could not take full advantage of the funding opportunities for which they were eligible.
“There’s some other funding you look at going after that you just can’t. You’ve got to kind of pick and choose,” Erickson said. “There’s a limit there. We shouldn’t complain because we may be bigger than some others, but still I can imagine how some of the other tribes could feel like they’re just drowning.”
Despite those barriers, several nations made significant investments using the federal support they did receive. For example, the Lummi Nation was one of the first in the U.S. to deliver vaccines, with the first administered in December 2020. Lewis emphasized that funding tribal health care is a key part of fulfilling the trust agreement between nations and the federal government.
“Our health system has been chronically underfunded, and we continuously advocate for full funding of our health system, but we’re still not there,” Lewis said. “When we sign the treaties that we have, and all the agreements that all the tribes have signed with the federal government, we’ve always said that we prepaid for our health care.”
In early 2021, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe became one of the first entities in Washington to offer a drive-thru vaccine clinic for any seniors in Sequim, during a time when vaccinations were in short supply throughout the state.
The report details a few solutions, including increasing agencies’ capacities to consult and work with nations to better design programs and provide technical assistance during implementation.
But the biggest takeaway is that programs should distribute funds using structures that already exist, rather than creating new ones. The GAO report highlighted two mechanisms: self-determination contracts and self-governance compacts. Self-determination contracts stipulate that nations control day-to-day operations with agency oversight, while self-governance compacts dictate that nations administer their programs directly.
Both avenues come with existing reporting requirements, and put decision-making power into the hands of tribal leaders.
“Tribes always are going to know what’s best for them,” Strong-Cvetich said. “And having a federal agency tell a tribe what to do during a pandemic, you know, a period of extreme uncertainty, wasn’t super meaningful.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Nickolaus Lewis' position with the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board.
