A Conversation with the Honorable Dr. Charles Grim

TC:  Many consider the agency to be chronically underfunded in terms of the number of people it has to service. Has the agency seen the budget grow over the last five or ten years, or stayed about the same?

CG:  Relative to our budget over the last decade, we've had roughly a billion dollar increase. Right now for 2004, our budget authority is about $2.9 billion, and with the 2005 President's budget request, our appropriated budget authority goes up to about $3 billion through our interior committees. So we've had a growth over the last decade of roughly a billion dollars. That is fairly significant. However, when you factor in the population growth we've had, the medical inflation that occurs, and pharmaceutical inflation like that, the per capita spending on our population has only increased very slightly.

But where we're at right now is that we have a $72 million increase, or about a two and a half percent increase in 2004 over our 2003 budget. But then we have other parts of our budget that get added in. We have health insurance collections, Medicare and Medicaid and private insurance that total about $590 million. And then we have a special diabetes program for Indians that was appropriated outside our budget by Congress of $150 million. Then we collect a little bit of money -- kind of like rent -- in staff quarters across the country. So that brings our total program level spending to about $3.7 billion. So that's our budget.

TC:  What other kinds of arrangements with outside organizations or institutions is the agency involved in that have financial ramifications as far as your operating budget?

CG:   I mentioned just a couple earlier that we do, sort of around recruitment and retention of students and things like that. But we have a huge number of partnerships with different groups, foundations, universities. We have one right now, a public/private partnership with Nike. We've signed a memorandum of understanding with the Veteran's Administration, and myself and my counterpart [at the V.A.] are being asked to work and do more with health care for Indian veterans. We have signed agreements with Canada. And we're working on sort of border issues for Canadian Indians and Americans Indians, and how we can share knowledge and information.