The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs approved a Senate bill to reauthorize funding for federal housing assistance to Native Americans and Native Hawaiians.
Senate bill 2264 would reauthorize the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, or NAHASDA.
The Housing and Urban Development program provides about $1 billion a year toward Native American housing.
The Senate reauthorization now goes before the full Senate before it goes to the House.
Each year, Congress continues to provide appropriations to the Native American Housing Assistance program without reauthorization.
A similar bill in the House (HR 5195) is in danger of stalling because it incorporates language that's not in the Senate version.
House Resolution 5195 would tie Tribal funding through the Indian Housing Block Grant – to compliance to an 1866 Treaty that provides Tribal citizenship to a group of people descended from enslaved Black laborers.
That wording would exclude four Tribes in the Lower 48 who do not recognize Freedmen descendants as citizens.