Nygren’s vetoes spark budget clash
over jobs, youth, housing
Courtesy | 25th Navajo Nation Council
Navajo Nation Speaker Crystalyne Curley and Delegate Shaandiin Parrish, the chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, lead a comprehensive budget forum at KTNN on Sept. 17, 2025.
WINDOW ROCK
Delegate Shaandiin Parrish, the Budget and Finance Committee chair, said the Council spent months building a data-driven fiscal 2026 comprehensive budget, only to see President Buu Nygren’s line-item vetoes cut programs that directly serve families, chapters and youth.
Parrish explained that the Council began preparing the budget only weeks after passing the fiscal 2025 plan, determined to avoid the delays and gaps that led to a continuing resolution last year.
“We began the discussion on the budget right after the passage of the fiscal 2025 budget,” she said. “We took a very, very deep dive on expenditure rates. We compared the operating expenditure rates to the personnel expenditure rates, and we developed what’s called a planning base amount.”
The planning base amount, Parrish said, was drawn from historical expenditure patterns and augmented with a 15 percent growth factor recommended by the controller. Those figures served as the starting point for negotiations with the three branches of government. While the Legislative Branch focused on performance-based budgeting, she said, the Executive and Judicial branches presented separate requests without a unified vision.
To read the full article, please see the Sept. 18, 2025, edition of the Navajo Times.
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