South Dakota Democrats working to mobilize American Indian voters and volunteers should find Donald Trump’s cruelty as effective an organizing tool on the reservations as anywhere else. Trump has a long history of distaste for indigenous Americans. He ignored the tribes who protested the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.
And now the Trump budget—yes, only a cruel con job, not a workable fiscal plan—would starve the reservations:
The sweeping cuts included in the Trump budget proposal have sent shivers through this community. The cuts could be devastating, according to Mason Big Crow, the Oglala Sioux tribe treasurer.
The tribe could lose at least half the money it receives from federal sources… [Juana Summers, “Looming Trump Budget Cuts Deepend Distress on Pine Ridge,” CNN, 2017.05.28].
Summers reports that the Trump budget would cut the Interior Department, seat of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, by 12%. The Trump budget would axe grants for after-school and summer youth programs and AmeriCorps. Plus—or perhaps I should say minus…
…at $2.488 billion, Trump’s request for the U.S. Department of Interior’s Indian Affairs budget alone is a $300 million cut from Obama’s FY 2016 budget, which was the last full year appropriation (we have since operated on continuing resolutions). Trump’s proposal also cuts more than $50 million for the Indian country housing programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and zeroes out $8 million from the BIA budget for housing. For the Indian Health Service, Trump’s budget eliminates roughly $150 million [Kevin Washburn, “Trump Proposes Hundreds of Millions in Cuts to Federal Appropriations for Indian Country,” Indian Country Today, 2017.05.25].
Rep. Kristi Noem has made political hay of saying Indian Health Service is in crisis. How knocking $150 million out of the IHS budget helps resolve a crisis escapes me… and it escapes Rep. Noem, too, who ignores Trump’s budget butchery of IHS and bleats about transparency and accountability at IHS.
Washburn, who worked in the Obama Administration’s BIA, lists even more cuts:
- Indian education: –$64 million.
- School construction: –$58 million.
- BIA law enforcement: –$21 million.
- DOJ Indian assistance: –$30 million.
- DOJ tribal youth delinquency: –$10 million
- Tribal natural resources management: –$27 million.
- Land management: –$15 million.
- Indian child welfare: $23 million.
- Tribal Priority Allocation funds: –$55 million.
- TPA contract support: –$35 million.
- Tribal self-governance compacts: –$5.4 million.
It’s not just the Indian-specific cuts that hurt our Native neighbors. The Lakota and other tribes will suffer along with the rest of us with big cuts to other assistance programs:
If the proposed budget passes, Medicaid, the national and state program that covers low-income individuals, could see its budget cut by $610 billion over the next 10 years. Mark Trahant, a journalist, academic and member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes who has covered NA/AN affairs for 30 years, is concerned.
“In Indian Country, more than half of all Indian kids who go through Indian Health Service have their insurance through Medicaid,” he said. “Thirteen percent of Medicaid is Indian care.”
The budget would eliminate programs like the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay to heat or cool their homes. In 2016, 150 tribal groups and more than 43,000 Native households received LIHEAP funds [Cecily Hilleary, “Trump Budget Calls for Cuts to Native American Health Care, Housing,” VOA News, 2017.05.25].
That’s probably more bullet points than a tribal organizer has time to recite to any Lakota voter she’s trying to recruit. But keep that list handy. We Democrats can’t promise to solve every problem in Pine Ridge in other indigenous communities. But we can promise to go to Washington and stop Trump from passing anti-Indian budgets that would devastate basic services to the tribes.
The tweeter dude let this stench out of his bedroom last night
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere. ObamaCare is dead – the Republicans will do much better!
5:57 PM – 28 May 2017
11,266 11,266 Retweets 52,082 52,082 likes
What does it mean, who the hell knows? Lets ask a member of the tribal cult republicans to trumpsplain it. What say you Greg?
Cutting LIEAP would be devastating to the Natives living in North and South Dakota, especially considering the inadequate housing and typically harsh winters. Natives, in particular, would see people sickened and many infants or elders actually dying from the inability to afford to adequately heat their homes during the coming winters.
LIEAP statutes have typically targeted heating help to the poorest of the poor. Trump is not the first to ignore the danger of sickness, suffering and death by attempting to curtail or redirect public funds that were literally intended to save lives.
When Janklow was SD governor he decided that the poorest of the poor in SD already got too much help. One year, the former Black Hills Legal Services, Inc., represented indigent litigants and obtained a federal court injunction that prevented the State from refusing to distribute about 1/2 million dollars in LIEAP funds, which otherwise would have reverted to the feds.
A year or so later, Janklow established unlawful eligibility requirements that attempted to bar the poorest of the poor from the program if they received public assistance with rent. BHLS again represented indigents and obtained another injunction stopping Janklow’s efforts to exclude the very poorest families from LIEAP assistance.
Interestingly, the next year Janklow tried the Trump 2.0 “Muslim ban” of “changing the wording” to accomplish the same lawless goals. BHLS clients sued again and obtained another federal injunction stopping Janklow’s revised LIEAP exclusion plan.
I suppose the silver lining (if there is a silver lining) is that Trump is trying to hurt the poor and our Natives by repealing, rather than violating, existing LIEAP laws. On the other hand, SD has more than one county that ranks at our near the bottom of the list of poorest counties in the entire US, and these counties are the home counties to several Native groups.
Shouldn’t assuring the safety and health of infants, elders and their families living in these counties be a high priority, if not the highest or only priority?
I may have related this story before on this blog, but it needs to be repeated.
When Jimmy Carter was president he enacted the CETA (Comprehensive Employment & Training Act) that was designed for reservations and other economically depressed areas of the country.
At one point there were over 300 tribal members enrolled in this program either for the private sector or receiving a variety of technical training.
When payday came CET recipients would flock to the borders town like Kadoka, Chadron, Rushville and Gordon to cash their checks and spend their money.
This was a time when good roads weren’t passable or you had to go through Hot Springs to get to Rapid City so money was spent in the border towns.
Many white people and even border town merchants hated this program and mocked it as a Carter folly and nothing more than a make work program.
Republicans lobbied hard for elimination of this program and when President Reagan took office it was one of the first to get the ax, leaving over 300 people unemployed and the white people cheered.
Now, Indians are cushioned to do with or without and they somehow found a way to survive.
The merchants didn’t survive, without the cash flow to their towns dried up.
The border towns never recovered from the economic loss of the CETA program and have deteriorated to what they are now, mostly ghost towns.
Rapid City is now more accessible to what remains of the current tribal and BIA jobs and reservation residents find Rapid City a much better place to spend their money.
The reservation pumps millions of dollars into to Rapid City, especially when it comes to the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament and Rapid City appreciates it and rolls out the red carpet.
If the Trump budget passes and the cuts to tribal and government it will be local and state economies impacted the most.
The state is on a downward slide in receiving sales tax income, can Governor Daugaard survive these cuts?
These cuts will cause an economic ripple affect that our local and state may not be able to sustain.
Poignant story, Roger. IMHO … one of government’s biggest jobs is to train people and “make jobs”. Of course social conservatives mocked the student/workers. To me, it matters little what these people think of you because they rarely do. Mostly they think about themselves.
People need to take a little responsibility and train their own damned selves. If they want more money, they need to work harder.
Grudz–
Oh for Pete’s sake , just stop with this blame the poor crap. It’s getting tiresome.
Mr. Buckobear, I am not blaming anybody who is poor. I blame the not poor who don’t work harder, too. But you have to admit, a great deal of being poor is personal choice, at least if you’re an adult.
Buckobear,
Ignore grudz, he makes irresponsible comments to draw attention to himself.
He simply follows a conservative Christian talking point.
Roger, thanks for telling us about the Carter program and how the GOP’s repeal of it hit the white exploiters harder than the resilient Natives it was intended to help. I know our Lakota brothers and sisters have intrinsic worth, but in a state where many white leaders think the only good Indian is a spending Indian, perhaps the prospect of such drastic reductions in the federal economic stimulus that flows through the reservations all the way back to Rapid City and the state sales tax coffers will get our lawmakers to resist the Trump/Ryan effort to Grover Norquist-ify the federal budget.
Roger, true that on mr. grudznick. He follows the teachings of Ben Carson, the director of HUD’s thought train who declares that “poverty is a state of mind”. The only blessings we have is that neither one of these “practice medicine”. What is always amazing to me is the sheer ignorance of these folks who think that by disparaging the poor, by denying basic human rights, is somehow going to make their own bottom line better. Economics, even basic 3rd grade arithmetic, are a mystery to them, especially subtraction (think contraction). When you deny the monetary needs for survival that mean purchase power, you stifle your own pocketbook with contraction (subtraction) of the economy. Less money for tax revenue, means less money for the basic services that folks like mr. grudznick depend upon as he has indicated, he just does not recognize his state of mind yet. This grand theft is no good for anyone but the wealthy like Thune, Rounds and the entire rogues gallery of cult tribal republicans.
It’s you that are “the poor”, Mr. Grudznik. Had you the wealth of The Trump, you’d still have the esteem of a rump.
Dear President trump
https://www.scribd.com/document/349851717/Dear-President-Trump#from_embed
trump said he was to be the president for all. He lied, just like those who elected this sorry excuse for a human being. They have been lying to themselves that this man would do anything other than to degrade and destroy our fellow citizens, to include those who voted for him. If it is so easy to put this kind of destruction for a people into a budget, what makes you are not subject to the same? White privilege only goes so far.