Federal Reserve Board Governor Barr calls for more timely disaggregated economic data in Indian Country and highlights CICD research

In a speech marking the Center for Indian Country Development’s (CICD) tenth anniversary, Federal Reserve Board Governor Michael S. Barr argued that persistent economic gaps affecting Native nations and Indigenous communities cannot be effectively tracked or addressed without timely, high-quality data that is disaggregated for Native peoples and geographies. He positioned CICD’s research and data tools as inputs to tribal decisionmaking and to the Federal Reserve’s community development work, including understanding economic conditions relevant to monetary policy and supervising banks’ Community Reinvestment Act performance in communities that include Indian Country. Barr cited indicators including lower household income and high poverty on reservations, lower reported ability to cover a USD 400 emergency expense in the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, higher unemployment, limited proximity of financial institutions to reservations, lower success rates for Native-owned small businesses seeking financing, and a higher cost of homeownership. He highlighted longstanding data constraints such as small sample sizes in national datasets and resulting mistrust from harmful prior uses of data, alongside limited tribal resources for data collection. The speech also pointed to CICD’s contributions over the past decade, including research on the role of tribal governments and tribally owned enterprises, distinctive features of tribal treasuries, infrastructure gaps such as broadband, access to capital and credit including analysis of Native community development financial institutions, and the development of data tools and surveys used to monitor economic conditions, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.