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- By Rob Capriccioso
- Economic Development
Alaska Republican Congressman Don Young, the dean of the House of Representatives who has long watched over American Indian and Alaska Native issues, is getting riled up.
Not that that’s unusual; even those who are close to him say this with fondness. But in this instance, it’s over a Native-focused issue that he’s been angered about before.
For federal agency officials he’s charged with overseeing, that’s never good news.
The recent focus of Young’s ire is the American Indian Population and Labor Force Report, which has been missing in action since 2013 when the U.S. Department of the Interior last published the report on its website.
Going back to the Reagan administration, Interior was supposed to maintain the statistics and provide the report to Congress every two years. The numbers were intended to help legislators, tribes, and everyone else keep track of labor needs and employment patterns on various reservations, and establish a strong baseline for everybody to better understand what resources were needed and where.
The department issued regular reports through the years, with occasional missing ones, and finger-pointing over who was to blame: Interior for not following the 1992 law that codified the reports, or Congress for not providing money to tribes to do the reports, or tribes for not being forthcoming enough. Then came a couple of missing reports during the early part of the Obama administration.
Young and other federal and tribal officials made the case when President Barack Obama’s Interior wasn’t releasing the report as required by law that there was a possible political reason related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Their notion was that some of the $3 billion apportioned to tribes under that law wasn’t going where it was needed most, so Interior was perhaps stalling to provide required statistics that would bear that out.
[RELATED: LABOR PAINS: Tribes say U.S. Labor Department top-level liaison long overdue]
But Del Laverdure and Kevin Washburn, both former leaders of Interior’s Indian Affairs during the Obama terms, and Bryan Newland, who served at Interior under Obama and is now nominated by President Joe Biden to become Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs, all insisted nothing nefarious was happening. They cited statistical and methodological problems, a lack of funding and staffing to do the reports correctly, and even made the case in a couple of instances that the reports just weren’t comparatively important to other mandates, even if they were required by law.
Young was not pleased, and he grilled many of Obama’s Interior officials on these issues, never seeming to give their excuses much weight. The outrage was bipartisan with current Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., as well as the late Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, all expressing some level of concern.
When Washburn — whose wife, Libby Washburn, now serves as Biden’s Special Assistant to the President for Native Affairs on the Domestic Policy Council — finally released the last of the issued reports in 2013, it was a 151-page compilation of data that didn’t satisfy anyone.
Young said the report was based on stale research and didn’t offer any new insight. At the time, Washburn said his staff was stretched too thin to meet the bipartisan demands of a Congress that wasn’t providing enough funding, and tribes didn’t find anything in the report about who and how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act helped.
‘Should be forthcoming’
Young — who noted during the recent midyear session of the National Congress of American Indians that his deceased first wife and his children and grandchildren are all Alaska Native — realized the report was going nowhere fast at Interior, so a new tactic was necessary.
Zack Brown, a spokesman for Young, noted “public scrutiny when DOI changed how it sourced, used, and reported data,” but said the congressman still “views this information as very valuable, and introduced legislation moving the main responsibility of gathering and reporting this information from DOI to the Department of Labor.”
Hypothetically, the Labor Department would have the resources, the expertise and the willingness to get it done well and fast, something that Washburn himself had argued in the past.
The ensuing bill, H.R.228, the Indian Employment, Training and Related Services Consolidation Act of 2017, passed and was enacted in December 2017. Nothing happened at Interior on the report through the end of the Obama administration and through the entirety of the Trump administration.
Brown told Tribal Business News on June 8 that Young’s understanding was that the Department of Labor was handling the gathering and reporting of this information going forward.
“The reason there is not a more recent report than the 2013 report is because the Department of Labor is still soliciting information on how best to do their report, as required by Congressman Young’s law,” Brown said at the time. “It should be forthcoming.”
But after Brown’s statement, there was another shoe to drop.
The Department of Labor was set to soon hold a meeting of the Native American Employment and Training Council on June 16, during which the department’s Office of Policy Development and Research (OPDR) would present findings related to the report, which had by that time been out of commission for 8 years, during the same time that many major economic pieces of legislation affecting Indian Country have passed.
Some of these laws, specifically the American Rescue Plan, require tribal employment numbers to distribute a whopping $19 billion to tribes. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has repeatedly pushed back its deadline for tribes to submit this information, because some tribes simply are not submitting the numbers, and this could cost them millions, even tens of millions of dollars.
If Interior and Labor had been collecting the data as required by law, this would not be a problem for the tribes. Checks could simply be sent off to them based on the government’s data, tribal and federal officials noted.
‘Lots of questions’
Before the meeting even started, it didn’t look like there was going to be promising news coming related to the report, with a Labor spokesman warning, “OPDR commissioned a report on ‘how to’ undertake the Indian Labor Force Report, but it will not be the report itself.”
The spokesman confirmed that the federal government was in the “how to” phase of doing a report that was first published in 1982.
Then came the virtual meeting, during which the researcher in charge of the report was sometimes difficult to hear over the barking of his dog.
“I apologize to all if he gets out of control, but I think we’ll be all right,” Wayne Gordon, the director of research and evaluation in Labor’s Employment and Training Administration’s Office of Policy Development and Research, said about his dog’s barks.
Gordon said he had already presented before the Native American Employment and Training Council two times previously about the report, and he joked that “two more visits, and I get a free pizza, so I’m looking forward to that.” He introduced two other staffers whom he said have been “invaluable” to date on this matter.
“We’ve approached this with a very wide lens and literally started at the beginning by asking broader questions …,” Gordon said. “We endeavor to locate, engage with, and listen to what tribal leaders, advocates and data specialists have had to say about this unique requirement.”
In 2020, Gordon said his team learned more about the nature of past reports, and concerns expressed about them from various tribal officials. In 2021, he said tribal consultation occurred in March after which his team compiled a list of responses from the consultation. Now, he is preparing a draft paper about the report, and his team is consulting with Interior, the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Congress of American Indians’ Ian Record and other academic experts.
“We intended to go beyond the usual suspects, and I think we’re well on the way to accomplishing that,” Gordon said, adding that he’s now exploring the questions of what were the most important uses for the report in the past and what tribes see as its use in the future.
“Lots of questions here,” he noted, saying that his team is rethinking the first product that Labor will deliver, meaning that they plan to present only “very limited data that help to advance the discussion” based on definitional, geographical and statistical issues.
In short, Gordon said Labor’s first update will be a report on how difficult it will be for Labor to do a comprehensive report. He said to expect that initial report “later this summer.” As for when a final, real report will be released, he said it “would be overstepping for me to speak on behalf of the department.”
In response to Gordon’s presentation during the meeting, Kim Carroll, director of grants and compliance with the Cherokee Nation, said that the report “is very important for tribes as a data source” and noted the difficulty in gathering its information.
Kay Seven, education director at the Nez Perce Tribe, said that her tribe felt pressed for time to provide information to Gordon when he previously asked for it in a 30-day time period during the pandemic.
“We just really need good technical assistance for all our organizations and tribes to collect our own data, and the best methods, or methodologies, to use for accuracy and reliability,” she said.
When asked by Seven when to expect a final report, Gordon said, “We’re trying to frame the issue that has continually undermined a good report. … It would be premature for me to make a claim on a date certain that we will have a (final) report.”
“Department of Labor is very mindful of getting consistent and verifiable data …,” added Athena Brown, the department’s division chief of Indian and Native American Programs.
‘Unacceptable’
After the meeting and upon finding out that the report was still in the early development phase, Young, sometimes known to express his temper in oversight hearings, vowed to find out what’s going on.
“It is very important that the American Indian Labor Force Report returns as soon as possible,” Young told Tribal Business News. “We have not seen one since 2013, and very frankly, that is unacceptable.”
Young, who serves as the ranking member of the Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States, said that supporting Native people across this country means having accurate, thorough data to help guide public policy.
“Without it, we risk implementing misguided solutions, or worse, actively harming our Native people,” he said.
“We are nearly a decade removed from the last American Indian Labor Force Report. In that time, significant pieces of legislation have been passed by Congress and enacted by the president,” added Young, an almost 50-year veteran of the House. “Additionally, economic changes have occurred, populations have changed, and new tribes have become federally recognized.
“In the absence of this report, Native communities risk being underfunded, lose out on job training programs, and sadly, continue to be overlooked by society. This is particularly upsetting given the immense job loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To get people back to work, we must have a full understanding of employment conditions on the ground; without data from our Native communities, we are not getting the full picture.”
Young pledged that he and his team “are currently investigating the bureaucratic mess behind its delay, and will be working hard to ensure that this report is once again issued as quickly as possible.”