Gregorio Sablan: “After a decade of negative GDP, the Marianas economy has begun to grow.”

Today is, indeed, a very important day, historic in some ways, because it marks the beginning of what I hope and I believe will be a successful bipartisan effort to renew the financial provisions of the Compacts of Free Association.

There is no easy way that our nation will be able to maintain our influence in what is becoming an increasingly strategic, important, and contested area of the world without continuing our partnership with the COFA nations.

Thus, we come here under Chairman Westerman's leadership to regroup and confront together the PRC's threat to the freedom of the blue continent that stretches across the Indo-Pacific region.

I explained the path we are forging to fiscal, economic, and social stability in the Commonwealth.