Starting June 5, the U.S. Treasury Department is scheduled to begin disbursing $3.2 billion in aid to tribal governments under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act—about six weeks after tribes expected the federal assistance.
Almost two-thirds of the CARES money pledged to tribes has been disbursed according to population data, but the remaining $3.2 billion was withheld because Treasury needed more time to process employment numbers and expenditures.
According to a spokesman for the Treasury Department: “Treasury balanced the potential burden of a relatively compressed time frame to respond against tribes’ immediate need for these funds during this public health emergency.”
Meanwhile, a 32-page study has been released by Harvard University, the University of Arizona and UCLA that studied how the Treasury Department employed its population data to produce arbitrary over- and under-representations of tribal enrolled members.
According to the study, “Different tribal population data series are available, and different series give rise to very different allocations of CARES Act dollars.”
Some tribes were listed as having no population, although that was inconsistent with U.S. census and tribal data, said the study. “The CARES Act dollars are specifically earmarked for tribal governments. Thus, the case is strong that Treasury should have used data on each tribe’s population of enrolled tribal citizens,” it said.
