Native American Energy Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, I rise today to express my support of this commonsense legislation.

This bill empowers Native Americans to invest in their communities, their people, and their resources as they see fit without the heavy hand of Washington bureaucracy trying to insert itself between them and their own land.

Under current policy, potential resource development on tribal lands face many obstacles that projects on private or State lands do not.

Before entering into a lease agreement with energy developers on their own land, a tribe must first attempt to navigate the long, slow, and duplicative process of the Department of Interior's approval. This process can be fraught with litigation and delays that chase away potential investments and crush otherwise viable projects.

The Native American Energy Act streamlines many of the duplicative Federal regulatory hurdles that prevent tribes or individuals from profitably developing energy resources on their land.

This will provide tribes with greater control over how they best develop their own natural resources and allow them to do so in ways that will best benefit their communities, not a D.C. bureaucrat's ideology.

Because of the commonsense and empowering reforms it contains, this bill has widespread support from the Indian tribes. It is odd that the only groups on record in opposition to this bill are the Obama administration and some Democratic members of the Natural Resources Committee.

Why does the administration continue to insist that bureaucrats from their comfy leather chairs and marble offices in Washington, D.C., know more about how to manage Indian land than the tribes themselves?

If Congress is actually serious about supporting tribal efforts to generate high-paying jobs and improving the everyday standard of living in American Indian communities, this bill is a real, concrete way to empower them to do so.

I commend the chairman and the committee for their work on this bill. I strongly urge my colleagues to support it.

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