Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Through a Feb. 06, “Controller Alert” memo to federal agencies, the Acting Controller of the Office of Management and Budget for the Executive Office of the U.S President, announced new matching funds waiver requirements for four insular areas.

The Alert, titled “Waiving Matching Fund Requirements for Insular Areas”, informed federal agencies of the legal requirement regarding waiver of local matching funds requirements for financial assistance  to the U.S. territories of American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and U.S. Virgin Islands.

According to the alert, which was also publicly released by the federal government online, federal agencies “are required” to waive any requirement for local matching funds under $200,000 for grants to the four insular areas.

For local matching funds for grants $200,000 and greater, federal agencies “may waive” the matching requirement for the four territories.

 The alert also said that federal agencies “should work judiciously to ensure implementation of these provisions, absent an agency-specific statute that conflicts with these provisions.”

“As such, agencies should conduct a statutory conflict analysis to determine if there are any authorizing statues that would preclude implementation of these provisions,” it says.

ASG’s Office of Disaster Assistance and Petroleum Management (ODAPM) director Lisa Tuato’o — who leads the ASG  Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) Team and is also the BIL Coordinator with federal agencies — had told Samoa News last month that the BIL states that “available federal funding opportunities require a local cost match.”

“And depending on the federal awarding agencies, the local cost matching ranges from 20% to 50% of the award,” said Tuato’o responding to Samoa News inquiries following questions raised by some senators on whether or not matching funds are required for BIL funded projects for American Samoa.

Tuato’o revealed that the ASG’s BIL Team has shared with federal agencies that, “the number one major challenge — among others — in submitting grant applications for these federal funds, is the lack of non-federal or local cost matching of the total estimated costs of the projects.” (See Samoa News edition Jan. 17, 2023 for story details.)

Samoa News points out that the lack of local matching funds has been a major set-back for ASG over the years.

Read Congresswoman Uifa’atali Amata’s comments made at the the IGIA meeting yesterday on this and other America Samoa issues elsewhere in this issue.