Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Well, it's a new week, and it is the same partial government shutdown.

And this lapse of funding is causing all kinds of issues in travel, in

messing with federal workers' lives. shutdowns hit everybody in different ways, but tribal communities

across the country are feeling it particularly hard. My colleague Savannah Peters has been reporting

on the relationship between tribal nations

and the federal budget process, and she's here to make us smarter about it. Welcome to the show,

Savannah. Thanks for having me on. So when it comes to this current shutdown, what are some of

the immediate effects being felt in tribal nations right now? The tribal leaders that I'm talking to say they were pretty thoroughly prepared for this

shutdown because we knew it was likely coming.

And so through advocacy and a lot of preparation, they've been able to avoid some of the very

worst outcomes.

But there is still a lot of funding that would typically

be flowing into tribal communities that isn't right now. And that means tribal leaders have

to make hard choices about which programs are essential and really need those resources.

Think tribal police, fire, maybe the food distribution program, and then think about

other programs that can go without for a while. And every tribal community is different and has

different contingency plans. But that might be the Historic Preservation Department shutting down,

or maybe the visitors in

Tourism Center, maybe it's higher education support.

Yeah, you mentioned that they were able to make contingency plans to avoid some of the sort of

worst outcomes.

...