California Congresswoman Katie Porter is advocating for the Marshall Islands on multiple fronts.
She joined with Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva last week in calling on the Biden Administration to appoint a special representative to the Compact talks with a National Security Council mandate, similar to the first Compact negotiations, to address the wide range of issues needing to be discussed.
She has been advocating since earlier this year to resolve nuclear test legacy compensation, health and radiological issues for Marshallese.
Now, she has drafted an amendment for the annual National Defense Authorization Act calling for a “declassification review” by the Departments of Defense and Energy of documents relating to nuclear, ballistic missile or chemical weapons tests conducted in the RMI.
The issue of still-classified documents relating to nuclear tests of the 1940s and 1950s has been a concern to RMI leadership for many years.
The proposed amendment is being supported by Representatives Amata Radewagen of American Samoa and Gregorio Kilili Sablan of the CNMI.
Staff with Congresswoman Porter’s office said they expect to know next week if it will get the support it needs to be included in the bill.
The amendment would require a report back to the Congress within one year of adoption of the legislation. The two departments would be required to make public any information that was declassified as a result of the review and to submit a justification to the Congress “for not declassifying any information required to be included in the declassification review that remains classified.”
In a September 6 letter, Porter and Grijalva urged the Biden Administration to name a personal representative of the president with a clear mandate from the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) to head the US Compact renegotiation team to enable resolution of the wide range of issues the talks need to encompass.
Grijalva is the chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources and Porter is the chair of this committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. They called for a return to the “precedent set by successful COFA (Compact) negotiations in the past” in which the US Compact team was headed by a presidential appointee with a broad mandate.
Their letter was sent to Kurt Campbell, the Indo-Pacific coordinator at the NSC. The two Democrats called for a complete change in tack from what they described as the Trump Administration’s “failed approach to future US relations with the Freely Associated States.”
The three-page letter to Campbell, who is a former Assistant Secretary of Sate for East Asia and the Pacific who has visited Majuro, described the value of the FAS to the United States and outlined their concern about China’s inroads in the region.