Proposal easedconcerns over possible cuts
Around US$575 million will be pumped into US Territories and Freely Associated States if the US$3.8 trillion federal budget proposed by US President Barrack Obama for the 2013 fiscal year gets the nod in the US. Around US$575 million will be pumped into US Territories and Freely Associated States if the US$3.8 trillion federal budget proposed by US President Barrack Obama for the 2013 fiscal year gets the nod in the US. This will be US$100 million more than the current allocation for these countries -- most of them in the Pacific -- -- in the 2012 fiscal year, which ends in September.
Obama’s budget proposal,released last month, detailed a US$575.3 million request from the Office of the Insular Affairs(OIA), which looks after US-affiliated insular communities. These are the US territories made up of Guam, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), while the Freely As sociated States are the MarshallIslands, Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau. “The budget request includes US$88 million in current ap propriations and US$487.3million in permanent and in definite appropriations for fiscal payments mandated by law to US Territories and Freely Associated States,” OIA announced in a statement.
