American Samoa government jobs up in the air

Transcript

MONICA MILLER: He's at the end of an Asia Pacific tour which took him to Japan, Indonesia, Australia and I believe South Korea. So he's returning home, making a 90-minute stop-over here, then goes to Hawaii before he heads back to Washington DC.

JOHNNY BLADES: It seems like a good time to ask you what do local people in the territory think of the new US administration's performance so far?

MM: Well, I can tell you that Governor Lolo announced that he's already put government employees - and there's about six-thousand employees if you bring in the authorities, the semi-independent government independent agencies - this is now going into the third week of them working on a short work day because the governor said that the funding from Washington is uncertain. We have had the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Interior, and this gentleman, Nikolao Pula, was attending Flag Day. But he had meetings with Governor Lolo and Congresswoman Aumua Amata. And basically the message from him is that everything is up in the air. Key positions within the Department of the Interior which deal with the territories have not been made. And  I believe that his suggestion is that we have to be frugal and there's no telling what's going to happen. But certainly we've heard all about the president's announcement that he intends to cut several government programmes. American Samoa depends on a lot of federal funding. We have about 23 million dollars for basic government operations. That'll go into the hospital and some of the key infrastructure projects that the American Samoa government has been planning on. And then when you have payroll being the major cost for government, definitely we're going to see some very difficult times ahead. And so that's how the Trump administration has come across to American Samoans. That's putting it in a very simple term. We do have a strong Republican Party here in American Samoa, but more and more, they've sort of been very silent since all these announcements about cuts have been coming from Washington.

JB: I guess the territory's leaders and representatives will just have to wait some time before they even get certainty or more confirmation on those concerns.

MM: Yes. But I do know one thing that the territory has really welcomed is President Trump saying he's going to do away with some of these executive orders, especially the ones that have expanded the monuments which has affected fishing for the boats that supply the canneries here in American Samoa.