A Broken History Continued: What Shutdowns Could Mean for Reservation Communities

During late September of 2023, the nation faced a threat that has become increasingly more commonplace: a looming possibility of government shutdown. With Congress unable to reach a consensus about budgeting and appropriations, partisan debates and an extended stalemate progressed to the point of potential shutdown. Luckily, President Biden helped narrowly avoid a shutdown through the passage of a continuing resolution, delaying it for 45 more days at the time of its signing on September 30th. 

Government shutdowns are detrimental throughout the nation, affecting lower income communities reliant on government assistance, federal workers, and more. However, the loss of government services disproportionately affects those living on Native American reservations. Many of the essential services in these communities receive substantial funding from the federal government. Established through treaties signed into law spanning from 1722 to 1868, these lines of support seek to provide compensation for the large expanses of land seized from these indigenous populations by the United States. Solidified by legislation such as the Transfer Act of 1955, which allowed for the transfer of all Native American healthcare-related services to the domain of the Public Health Service, these treaties ostensibly established a solid stream of funding towards the nation’s indigenous populations. In related sectors, the Snyder Act gave Congress the authority to appropriate funding for the overall assistance of Native Americans, though only until 1955. While this law is now longer applicable, similar succeeding legislation sought to expand this act, attempting to aid reservations in not only health care but food assistance, childcare, and education. 

The introduction of treaties and acts such as these gave form to the “Indian Health Services.” A program of the Health and Human Services Department, this agency is based in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which outlines the powers and restrictions of Congress, and encompasses the delivery of health services to reservation populations. With legislation like this, the U.S. government takes on the responsibility of providing these necessary services to Native American populations in exchange for their land consolidation, as the federal government increasingly usurped control over their indigenous land. As a result, government funding is essential in keeping a majority of the health service facilities on reservations afloat.

The threat of a shutdown shed light on the incongruencies in legislation and its evident effects on reservation communities. In line with the federal government’s historical failure to fulfill or even maintain its treaties with Native Americans, federal funding for indigenous populations has not always garnered the intended positive effects. Though this phenomenon was merely brought to the surface by the threat of a government shutdown, prompting discussions about the disparate impacts shutdowns have for indigenous populations, evidence of disproportionately poorer services for Native Americans on reservations has existed well before. The nation’s indigenous population has evidently worse health and wellness rates when compared to the majority of the United States. Native Americans experience heart disease at 1.3 times that of all races, the rate of diabetes jumping to 3.2 times their counterparts. The Indian Health Services, a government entity monitoring the health facilities on indigenous reservations and the federal government being the main source of funding, has garnered debate surrounding this link between federal legislation and quality of health care for Native Americans. Rights advocates of the Indian Law Resource Center argue that the systems under which indigenous populations live are unconstitutional, proving impossible for social and economic growth. Impediments to sovereignty and development cause “American Indian Law” to fall short of its responsibility to indigenous populations, creating another layer of inequity for this community. 

These existing realities become exacerbated during a government shutdown, when the effectiveness and availability of federally-funded services decreases. Facilities providing health and energy services are forced to pick which essential programs will stay open in the event of a prolonged shutdown, scrambling for contingency plans to ensure that there is at least some access to assistance. During a previous shutdown in 2018, tribes even resorted to using their own funds to keep federal programs running. Here arises yet another problem with the United States government’s execution of the laws and treaties set in place to support Native American communities. Additional lack of clarity from the federal government on how reduced services would function during another shutdown again begs the question of whether established legislation and treaty agreements are presently ineffective. If so, is there a way to expand or solidify them? The Indian Health Care Improvement Act, passed in 1996, outlines the federal government’s role to provide health and education services to Native American populations, implementing an improvement of facilities and maximizing participation in these services. In practice, this would stabilize the quality of care for facilities on reservations during a government shutdown and enact measures to ensure that funding stays federal. However, over 20 years after this act’s implementation, Native Americans living on reservations still scramble for resources during shutdown threats and resort to curtailing essential services. A reinforcement and further expansion of this 1996 legislation could avoid tribes needing to reach into their own pockets and preserve their services when the nation’s indigenous populations have already paid with the price of their land.

Sinclair Harris is a first-year at Brown University concentrating in Political Science and History. She is a staff writer for the BULR Blog and can be contacted at sinclair_harris@brown.edu.