Starzyk & Associates LLC · October 2, 2026 The Senate’s long-awaited permitting deal is finally on paper, and it rewrites how tribal nations are heard on federal projects. On September 30, the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Environment and Public Works and Energy and Natural Resources Committees (Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Mike Lee (R-UT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM)) introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of

Starzyk & Associates LLC · Federal Government Affairs · Indian Country Policy On the afternoon of September 23, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs approved S. 5354, the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Modernization Act of 2026, by voice vote. The pace here is worth noting. Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Vice Chairman Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced the bill on August 6. The Committee held its hearing on September 16. One week later, the bill w

Every five years or so, Congress writes a single bill that sets the terms for commodity prices, food assistance for roughly one in eight Americans, conservation on hundreds of millions of private acres, rural broadband, agricultural credit, federal forest management, and agricultural research. It is the largest recurring domestic policy package Congress produces, and it is running late. Depression-era origins The farm bill began as emergency legislation. The Agricultural Adju

There is a Department of Defense environmental program that has been running for twenty-eight years, has cleaned up unexploded ordnance, abandoned fuel tanks, lead, and PCBs on tribal land across the country, and costs less in a year than the Pentagon spends in a few hours. Outside the tribes enrolled in it, almost nobody knows it exists. The program is NALEMP, the Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program. If you work on defense environmental policy, appropriati

On August 7, ACF proposed a rule — "Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs" — that would replace much of the current Head Start Program Performance Standards with a significantly shorter set of regulations. The core move is straightforward: strip operational detail out of regulation and lean on what the Head Start Act itself requires. And that distinction is everything. Because a statute always supersedes an agency regulation, anything Congress wrote into the Act sta

Two ethics cases, two very different outcomes The House Ethics Committee has become the story to watch, and the contrast between two Republicans tells you a lot about how these things play out. Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina saw his re-election campaign collapse after the Ethics panel released a detailed report finding he engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct toward two young female staffers. Facing public outcry and pressure from fellow Republi

On July 24, 2026, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) voted to advance a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would rewrite 36 C.F.R. Part 800 — the regulations that have governed the Section 106 review process since their last comprehensive revision in 2000. The vote was 16 in favor, 5 opposed, and 2 abstentions. It is the most consequential change to the historic preservation review process in more than two decades, and for Tribal Nations it is not a technica

On August 4, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs convened a bipartisan roundtable — "Tracking Prediction Markets' Exponential Growth: Tribal Implications and Beyond" — hosted by Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Vice Chairman Brian Schatz (D-HI). It was, by the participants' own account, the most direct conversation Congress has had yet about a threat that tribal gaming leaders say is already reshaping their revenue base: the rapid, largely unregulated spread of sports-re