Congress took a rare bi-partisan step four years ago when it passed legislation I authored to address Puerto Rico’s two biggest needs: restructuring more than $70 billion in public debt and regaining access to the capital markets. Unfortunately, the roughly 3 million American citizens that call the island home remain in limbo due to the perpetual ineffectiveness of the territory’s federally-appointed overseers. It is now incumbent upon President Donald Trump to install new and effective leadership.
The widely-supported 2016 bill—known as PROMESA—provided for the creation of a seven-member, bi-partisan oversight board to usher the Commonwealth and its instrumentalities through debt reduction proceedings. But despite having a clear mandate and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on bankruptcy advisors, the board has restructured less than 30% of Puerto Rico’s public debt since forming in 2016.
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