Letter to Vicente Anthony Ada, Guam Republican Party State Chairman - Republican Support for the HEROES Act

Letter

Dear Chairman Senator Ada:

The House is expected to vote at the end of this week on H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, a comprehensive bill that provides additional relief to states, territories, and local governments that have been faced with difficult challenges in responding to the pandemic and national public health emergency. If passed into law, the HEROES Act would provide an additional $2.4B from the Coronavirus Relief Fund to the government of Guam and a total of $300M to our local public entities. These funds would be available to our government for use to respond to, mitigate, cover costs, or replace foregone revenues not projected on January 31, 2020 stemming from the national public health emergency or its negative impacts, with respect to the coronavirus disease.

Additionally, the bill contains language to provide long-awaited federal reimbursement for the Earned Income Tax Credit that we have collectively sought for over a decade, as well as Medicaid extension to our COFA migrants, reducing the healthcare burden our island has faced.

Moreover, many Americans across our nation, as in Guam, are faced with difficult financial decisions as they find themselves either out of jobs or working high-risk jobs that potentially endanger their loved ones, unable to discern life for the next day. The HEROES Act additionally provides critical
programming that will reach our people quickly to help them back on their feet as our nation
contemplates opening our economy in the next few weeks. We are talking about rental assistance,
mortgage assistance, premium pay for our public and private frontliners, additional EIP and inclusion of college age students and adult dependents, and more.

Our mutual desire and recent partnerships to provide for the people of Guam has yielded much for our island territory this last year. I once again seek the assistance of the Guam Republican National Committee (RNC) in ensuring that critical provisions of the HEROES Act pertinent to our island, if not the entire bill, is protected in the Republican-led Senate, as well as President Trump's Administration.

With the combined support of the Guam RNC, together we can again see to it that the people of Guam are secured and not excluded from critical federal government programming that is offered to our fellow Americans in the mainland United States.

My appreciations again to the Committee for your assistance here in our nation's Capital, and I look
forward to working with you as we continue the work to secure the fullest inclusion of Guam in federal relief.

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