The Executive Director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration (PRFAA), Gabriella Boffelli, welcomed the new Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Alex Meyer, with whom she has been in discussions since early January.

As Congress begins work on a budget reconciliation and tax reform package, Governor Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colón announced today that Representatives Ron Estes (R-Kansas) and Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands) have introduced bipartisan legislation to temporarily increase the amount of funding transferred to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands from the excise taxes collected on rum produced in the two territories and imported in to the rest of the United States, commonly known as the rum cover-over. The bill would extend the increase through 2032 and make it retroactive to January 1, 2022.

Governor Jenniffer González-Colón thanked Senators Rick Scott and Alex Padilla for reintroducing the Caribbean Border Counternarcotics Strategy Act, a bill the Governor led in the previous Congress to codify the requirement for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to develop a strategy to combat drug trafficking from the Caribbean into the United States, with a particular focus on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.