Biden to sign executive order improving tribal access to federal funds

President Biden is set to sign an executive order Wednesday aimed at making it easier for tribal communities to access federal funding. 

The order, which Biden will sign as part of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit, will overhaul the mechanism for the federal government’s support of tribal nations, Biden administration officials said on a call with reporters. The order is meant to remedy past federal policies that they described as “attacks on Native people’s basic rights to self-governance.”

Despite efforts to reverse these issues that began in the 1970s, officials said, numerous bureaucratic hurdles remain in place for tribal nations seeking to access federal funding. The Wednesday executive order is intended to better align such funding with the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, a 1975 statute that allowed federal departments to contract with tribes.

The administration has also launched a database through the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs outlining all available tribal federal funding. 

“As a result of this Executive Order, Tribes will spend less of their resources cutting through bureaucratic red-tape to apply or comply with federal administrative requirements and use federal dollars more effectively,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order. “No longer will Tribes be faced with seemingly unnecessary and arbitrary limitations when they are accessing critical funding for public safety, infrastructure, education, energy, and much more.”

Although the White House Tribal Summit began in 2009 under the Obama administration, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Senate-confirmed Cabinet secretary, has made tribal issues a major priority since taking office. Haaland’s Interior Department has also launched an ongoing review of the federal boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly sent in the 19th and early-20th centuries, where they were forbidden to grow out their hair or speak their traditional languages.