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BOISE, Idaho — The White House has reached what it says is an historic agreement over the restoration of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, a deal that could end for now a decades long legal battle with tribes.

Facing lawsuits, the Biden administration has agreed to put some $300 million toward salmon restoration projects in the Northwest, including upgrades to existing hatcheries that have helped keep the fish populations viable in some parts of the Columbia River basin.

The deal also includes a five year stay on litigation and a pledge to develop more tribally run hydropower projects and study alternatives for farmers and recreators should Congress move to breach four large dams on the Snake River, a Columbia tributary, which tribes say have long been the biggest impediment for the fish.

“Many of the Snake River runs are on the brink of extinction. Extinction cannot be an option,” says Corrine Sams, chair of the wildlife committee of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

The agreement stops short of calling for the actual breaching of those four dams along the Lower Snake in Washington state. Biden administration officials insisted to reporters in a call Thursday that the president has no plans to act on the dams by executive order, rather they said it’s a decision that lies solely with Congress.

A conservation bill introduced by Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson to authorize the breaching of the dams has been stalled for more than a year, amid stiff opposition from Northwest wheat farmers and utility groups.

When the details of Thursday’s salmon deal were leaked last month, those groups claimed it was done in secret and breaching the dams could devastate the region’s clean power and wheat farming economies that rely on a river barge system built around the dams.

“The agreement announced by the Biden Administration commits the U.S. Government to spending hundreds of millions of dollars that will ultimately end up being paid by electricity consumers in communities throughout the West,” said Heather Stebbings, interim executive director of Northwest RiverPartners in a statement.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If you’re unhappy about the state of air travel in the U.S., you’re in good company.

Complaints about U.S. airlines climbed sharply in the first half of the year, consumer advocates say, as passengers remain deeply dissatisfied despite some improvements in performance.

“The complaint data is pretty jaw-dropping,” said Teresa Murray, a consumer advocate with U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which published a new report based on data released by the Department of Transportation.

Flight cancellations were down significantly in the first nine months of the year, according to the DOT. Murray called that trend encouraging but said delays and mishandled luggage remain major problems.

“People are still ticked off and unhappy with their airline experience,” she said in an interview. “The complaints are continuing to pour in.”

Travelers filed more than 26,000 formal complaints about U.S. airlines in the first five months of 2023 — more than double the number filed during the same period last year, according to the report, and on pace to break the annual record set in 2022.

The aviation system has struggled to keep pace with a surge in demand, as travel volumes rebounded quickly to pre-pandemic levels. That’s left both the airlines and many air traffic control centers short-staffed.

“We are seeing more people flying than ever with fewer cancellations than we have seen in years,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at a news conference last month.

The biggest U.S. airlines canceled about 1.6% of flights from January through September of this year — down from 2.8% during the same period last year.

Buttigieg called that “a clear improvement in the numbers” and said airlines deserve some of the credit, “both in terms of the realism of their schedules and in terms of having the staffing and the preparation to meet the demand that’s come in.”

But at the same time, the number of delays has grown.

The largest U.S. airlines had an on-time performance of 76.2% during the first nine months of the year, down from 76.6% last year. That figure has fallen below 77% only one other time in the past 15 years, Murray said.

The aviation system was largely able to avoid major service disruptions during the recent Thanksgiving holiday. But many travelers haven’t forgotten the meltdown of 2022, when winter storms and a software glitch at Southwest Airlines caused thousands of canceled flights and chaos across the country.

Murray said travelers should brace for another challenging holiday travel season.

“We know that the flights are going to be absolutely jam-packed here in the next couple of weeks,” she said. “We definitely recommend that you do the old thing of getting to airports early because you have less of a chance of getting bumped. You have more of a chance of getting where you want to get.”

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The House of Representatives has voted along party lines to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, as House Republicans intensify the investigation into Biden they opened earlier this year.

The vote was 221-212, with all Republicans in support. The vote is intended, in part, to give committees greater legal authority to enforce subpoenas.

House Republicans allege that President Biden and his family engaged in an “influence peddling” scheme and took payments from foreign adversaries. The inquiry focuses largely on the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and his foreign business dealings.

So far, Republicans have not presented any clear evidence of impeachable offenses by President Biden. Both Hunter Biden and the White House have vehemently denied the allegations.

Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote, House Oversight Chair James Comer said the committees “are now at a pivotal moment” in their investigation.

“We will soon depose and interview several members of the Biden family and their associates…but we are facing obstruction from the White House,” Comer said. “President Biden must be held accountable.”

Congressional Democrats have decried the inquiry as politically motivated.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who served as an impeachment manager in former President Trump’s second impeachment trial, said Republicans’ “stupid, blundering investigation” was preventing the House from getting any work done.

“After 11 months of this, no one can tell us what President Biden’s crime was, much less where it happened, when it happened, what the motive was, who the perpetrators were or who the victims were,” Raskin said on the House floor.

Materially, the vote will change little about the ongoing investigations already being conducted by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees. But politically, securing a formal impeachment inquiry is a victory for the far-right flank of the Republican party.

In a statement, President Biden called the inquiry a “baseless political stunt.”

“Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, [House Republicans] are focused on attacking me with lies,” he said.

The White House has repeatedly dismissed the impeachment inquiry — with claims dating back before Biden was president — as a political charade. It’s occurring as Biden’s predecessor and likely opponent in the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump, faces dozens of criminal charges in several indictments, including for attempts to subvert the 2020 election.

Hunter Biden gives a forceful denial in rare public statement

The vote comes hours after Hunter Biden failed to appear for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee.

In a rare press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Biden told reporters that he is willing to testify in a public hearing, but not behind closed doors.

“Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics exposed, expose their baseless inquiry or hear what I have to say,” Biden said.

Comer and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in a statement that Biden “defied lawful subpoenas” by failing to appear, and that they would now “initiate contempt of Congress proceedings.”

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Hunter Biden said that “there is no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business. Because it did not happen.”

“Let me state as clearly as I can,” Biden said. “My father was not financially involved in my business. Not as a practicing lawyer. Not as a board member of Burisma, not my partnership with a Chinese private businessman. Not in my investments at home nor abroad, and certainly not as an artist.”

Last month, Oversight Committee Chair Comer presented documents that allegedly suggested President Biden received payments from Hunter Biden’s law firm, which had received payments from Chinese companies and other foreign entities. Hunter Biden’s lawyers responded that the payments were from Hunter to his father, to repay him for financing a truck when he was unable to secure credit.

“In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances,” Hunter Biden said. “But to suggest that is grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd. It’s shameless.”

Hunter Biden accused House Republicans of “cherry-picking lines from a bank statement, manipulating texts I sent, editing the testimony of my friends and former business partners, and misstating personal information that was stolen from me.”

Republicans defend their probe

Comer defended his investigation Wednesday morning, calling it “a serious, credible, transparent investigation from day one.”

“This is an investigation about public corruption at the highest levels,” the Kentucky Republican added. “We have accumulated mountains of evidence that’s concerning to an overwhelming majority of Americans. … We expect to depose the president son and then we will be more than happy to have a public hearing with him.”

Jordan said he was “disappointed” that Biden did not appear, and said that an initial public hearing wouldn’t work.

“You do it in an open format now, you’re gonna get filibusters, you’re gonna get speeches, you’re gonna get all kinds of things,” he said. “What we want is the facts.”

Roughly two-thirds of Americans with a diagnosed mental health condition were unable to access treatment in 2021, though they had health insurance. And only a third of insured people who visited an emergency department or hospital during a mental health crisis, received follow-up care within a month of being discharged.

These are among the findings of a new report by the actuary firm Milliman, released Wednesday. The mental health advocacy group, Inseparable, commissioned the report and also released an accompanying brief offering policy solutions to address the gaps in mental health care.

“We kept hearing nightmare stories about Americans not getting the treatment that they needed because insurance companies were denying them care,” says Bill Smith, founder of Inseparable. “But we didn’t have enough data to show just how extensive and deep the problem was.”

The report is “illuminating” and timely, says Meiram Bendat, a psychotherapist and an attorney, who wasn’t involved in writing it. “We’re dealing with an issue that [is] on top of mind for nine out of ten people.”

While the overall findings aren’t surprising, “it is striking that the access impediments remain what they are,” adds Bendat who founded PsychAppeal, a law firm focused on mental health insurance advocacy. Those barriers include a workforce shortage, poor reimbursement rates for providers, and “substandard enforcement” of consumer protections and laws requiring that insurance companies cover mental health conditions.

“The data confirm what so many families and our friends know, which is that mental health access is a problem,” says psychologist Benjamin Miller, one of the authors of the accompanying policy solutions brief. “It’s very clear that there are people who have identifiable conditions, who are not able to find providers to help them.”

The Milliman report, which used a range of publicly available surveys as well as proprietary health insurance claims data, found that nearly a quarter of people with insurance – Medicaid, commercial insurance and Medicare – had at least one mental health diagnosis in 2021.

Many of those people don’t get treatment. Among the roughly half of Americans who are covered with commercial insurance, only about 30% of those with a mental health or addiction diagnosis got connected to a behavioral health specialist.

People on Medicaid with such diagnoses were the most likely to see a mental health care provider, with about 44% getting care. Only about 15% of those on Medicare got care for their diagnoses.

That’s an “astonishing gap” in mental health coverage, says Smith. “Across the board, the numbers aren’t great.”

The gap in mental health treatment, “won’t close unless private insurance companies” take steps to increase access to mental health care, he says. “We have a long way to go.”

The report also finds that over half of the U.S. population lives in areas designated as Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, and that the country has less than a third of the psychiatrists needed to meet those provider shortages.

“We have not moved the needle on increasing availability of our workforce,” says Miller. “I’ve been using the same data point for about ten years that half the country lives in a mental health provider shortage area. And it hasn’t changed.”

In their report, Miller and his colleagues offer concrete policy solutions to address the workforce shortage and coverage gaps in insurance plans, including expanding the use of telehealth and use of peer support specialists.

The authors also suggests providing “competitive reimbursement rates” for mental health care professionals

Another report by Milliman published in 2019 had found that mental health care providers are reimbursed at lower rates than physical health providers. “We’ve known for a long time that there is under-reimbursement of care,” says Bendat.

Addressing that disparity in payment would help prevent health care worker burnout and ensure more mental health providers are in-network to care for the growing number of people in need.

The Inseparable solutions report also recommends that insurance companies be mandated to provide up-to-date accurate directories for in-network providers.

“The problem with these in-network directories is that when you begin to call around and you begin to ask people, ‘Can you see me? Are you accepting new patients?’ The answer to a lot of them is no, they’re not accepting new patients,” says Miller. “Some provider directories are old enough that you might even have people on there that are not practicing anymore.”

But requiring health plans to cover out-of-network care is also crucial, say Miller and his colleagues.

“The insurance company should pay that cost to cover your care regardless of whether or not it’s in their network or not,” says Smith. “It’s a huge problem when you have people that are making decisions about their health and the safety of their families and doing that from a place of scarcity.”

As the Milliman report finds, the average out-of-pocket cost for an hour-long psychotherapy session in 2021 was $174, which is a huge barrier to access.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Behind American Indian Hall on the Montana State University campus, ancient life is growing.

Six-foot-tall corn plants tower over large green squash and black-and-yellow sunflowers. Around the perimeter, stalks of sweetgrass grow. The seeds for some of these plants grew for millennia in Native Americans’ gardens along the upper Missouri River.

It’s one of several Native American ancestral gardens growing in the Bozeman area, totaling about an acre. Though small, the garden is part of a larger, multifaceted effort around the country to promote “food sovereignty” for reservations and tribal members off reservation, and to reclaim aspects of Native American food and culture that flourished in North America for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers.

Restoring bison to reservations, developing community food gardens with ancestral seeds, understanding and collecting wild fruits and vegetables, and learning how to cook tasty meals with traditional ingredients are all part of the movement.

“We are learning to care for plant knowledge, growing Indigenous gardens, cultivating ancestral seeds, really old seeds from our relatives the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara: corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers,” said Jill Falcon Ramaker, an assistant professor of community nutrition and sustainable food systems at Montana State. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Anishinaabe.

“A lot of what we are doing here at the university is cultural knowledge regeneration,” she said.

But it also has a very practical application: to provide healthier, cheaper, and more reliable food supplies for reservations, which are often a long way from supermarkets, and where processed foods have helped produce an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease.

Many reservations are food deserts where prices are high and processed food is often easier to come by than fresh food. The Montana Food Distribution Study, a 2020 paper funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, found that the median cost in the state of a collection of items typically purchased at a grocery store is 23% higher on a reservation than off.

“With food sovereignty we are looking at the ability to put that healthy food and ancestral foods which we used to survive for thousands of years, putting those foods back on the table,” Ramaker said. What that means exactly can vary by region, depending on the traditional food sources, from wild rice in the Midwest to salmon on the Pacific coast.

Central to the effort, especially in Montana, are bison, also referred to as buffalo. In 2014, 13 Native nations from eight reservations in the U.S. and Canada came together to sign the Buffalo Treaty, an agreement to return bison to 6.3 million acres that sought “to welcome BUFFALO to once again live among us as CREATOR intended by doing everything within our means so WE and BUFFALO will once again live together to nurture each other culturally and spiritually.”

Nearly a decade later, dozens of tribes have buffalo herds, including all seven reservations in Montana.

The buffalo-centered food system was a success for thousands of years, according to Ramaker. It wasn’t a hand-to-mouth existence, she wrote in an article for Montana State, but a “knowledge of a vast landscape, including an intimate understanding of animals, plants, season, and climate, passed down for millennia and retained as a matter of life and death.”

Ramaker directs both the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative and a regional program, the Buffalo Nations Food Systems Initiative, or BNFSI — a collaboration with the Native American Studies Department and College of Education, Health and Human Development at Montana State.

With bison meat at the center of the efforts, the BNFSI is working to bring other foods from the northern Plains Native American diet in line with modern palates.

The BNFSI has received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to carry out that work, in partnership with Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in New Town, N.D.

Life on reservations is partly to blame for many Native people eating processed foods, Ramaker said. Food aid from the federal government, known as the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, has long been shipped to reservations in the form of boxes full of packaged foods.

“We were forced onto the reservations, where there was replacement food sent by the government — white flour, white sugar, canned meat, salt, and baking powder,” she said.

Processed foods contribute to chronic inflammation, which in turn leads to heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, which occurs at three times the rate in Native Americans as it does in white people.

Studies show that people’s mental and physical health declines when they consume a processed food diet. “In the last decade there’s a growing amount of research on the impact of good nutrition on suicide ideation, attempts, and completion,” said KayAnn Miller, co-executive director of the Montana Partnership to End Childhood Hunger in Bozeman, who is also involved with the BNFSI.

All Native American reservations in Montana now have community gardens, and there are at least eight different gardens on the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The tribe is teaching members to raise vegetables, some of it made into soup that is delivered to tribal elders. This year members grew 5 tons of produce to be given away.

Ancestral seeds are part of the effort. Each year the BNFSI sends out 200 packets of seeds for ancestral crops to Indigenous people in Montana.

Creating foods that appeal to contemporary tastes is critical to the project. The BNFSI is working with Sean Sherman, the “Sioux Chef,” to turn corn, meat, and other Native foods into appealing dishes.

Sherman founded the award-winning Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis and in 2020 opened the Indigenous Food Lab, through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. The lab, in downtown Minneapolis, is also a restaurant and an education and training center that creates dishes using only Indigenous foods from across the country — no dairy, cane sugar, wheat flour, beef, chicken, or other ingredients from what he calls the colonizers.

“We’re not cooking like it’s 1491,” Sherman said last year on “Fresh Air,” referring to the period before European colonization. “We’re not a museum piece or something like that. We’re trying to evolve the food into the future, using as much of the knowledge from our ancestors that we can understand and just applying it to the modern world.”

Among his signature dishes are bison pot roast with hominy and roast turkey with a berry-mint sauce and black walnuts.

In consultation with Sherman, Montana State University is building the country’s second Indigenous food lab, which will be housed in a new $29 million building with a state-of-the-art kitchen, Ramaker said. It will open next year and expand the ongoing work creating recipes, holding cooking workshops, feeding MSU’s more than 800 Native students, and preparing cooking videos.

Angelina Toineeta, who is Crow, is studying the BNFSI at Montana State as part of her major in agriculture. “Growing these gardens really stuck out to me,” she said. “Native American agriculture is something we’ve lost over the years, and I want to help bring that back.”

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Copyright 2023 KFF Health News. To see more, visit KFF Health News.

President Biden will sign an executive order Wednesday that White House officials say will demonstrate the government’s respect for tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

The order comes as the 11th White House Tribal Nations Summit begins in Washington, D.C.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told reporters the administration has focused on tribal co-management of federal resources, and seeking tribal input on decisions before they become policy.

“We will announce 190 co-stewardship agreements have been signed this year by our administration,” she said. “Tribes from coast to coast are playing a greater role in the management of the lands and waters they have cared for since time immemorial.”

The statement is sure to rankle on the Arctic Slope of Alaska. A delegation of tribal, local government and Alaska Native corporation leaders from there have complained to Congress in recent weeks that Haaland wouldn’t meet with them to hear their views, which generally favor oil development in their region.

The executive order includes provisions intended to make it easier for tribes to access federal funds while adding flexibility and eliminating onerous reporting requirements.

Tom Perez, senior advisor to President Biden, told reporters the administration has made record-breaking investments of some $46 BILLION to tribal nations.

“Tribal communities know best what is in their community’s best interest,” he said. “And through that partnership, they continue to make much needed updates to tribal roads, bridges, delivering clean water, (and) high-speed internet to indigenous communities and to ease the impact of climate change.”

The tribal nations summit began in 2009 and was an annual event during the Obama administration. Donald Trump did not continue it during his years at the White House. This is President Biden’s third summit.