Interior Names New Office for Indians’ Trust
Norton Pressured to Improve Accounting Process for Fund
The Washington Post
By: Bill Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 16, 2001
Facing pressure from a federal judge, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton yesterday said she will create a new office to focus entirely on straightening out problems in a trust fund maintained for roughly 300,000 Native Americans.
Norton said she intends to appoint an assistant interior secretary who will have direct responsibility for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in the trust accounts and reforming an accounting system that has been in disarray for decades. The new office, called the Bureau of Indian Trust Assets Management, will centralize the work done by various Interior agencies and speed reform efforts, Norton said.
“This new approach will help us move ahead with trust reform,” Norton said in an interview after announcing the moves. “It will allow better coordination so that we can have a solid game plan for trust reform and put it into effect.”
The actions come at a time when U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth is showing impatience with Norton’s handling of the trust fund, which was set up more than 100 years ago to compensate Native Americans for use of their land. He has threatened to hold Norton and 38 other current and former government officials and lawyers in contempt of court for allegedly misleading him about the extent of problems and the status of the reform efforts.
Lamberth is presiding over a lawsuit filed five years ago by Indians who contend they are owed up to $10 billion because of chronic accounting failures. He ordered the Interior Department to repair the system in a December 1999 ruling that detailed a history of incompetence and neglect. Although Norton didn’t take office until January, the judge has said he would hold her accountable for continuing problems.
At a hearing last month, Lamberth said it wasn’t clear to him who was even in charge of trust reform efforts and remarked, “If it’s allegedly the secretary, she sure doesn’t act like it.” He has threatened to name an outside receiver to manage the trust.
Lamberth demanded a response from government lawyers by yesterday, and Norton’s reorganization plan was detailed in a filing submitted to the court. According to the court papers, the plan will be put into effect after officials get further input from Congress, Indian tribes, and Interior workers and their unions.
The judge has ordered both sides to return to court Nov. 30.
Elouise P. Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana and the lead plaintiff in the case, said yesterday that she will continue to push Lamberth to appoint an outside receiver to run the trust system. Norton’s plan, Cobell said, “sounds like another last-ditch effort to keep control when they know they can’t manage it.”
Norton’s predecessor Bruce Babbitt launched his own reorganization in 1999 just before Lamberth convened court hearings. Despite those efforts, the Interior Department still can’t provide an accurate accounting of trust assets for account-holders.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs traditionally has played a critical part in managing and collecting royalties from the sale of petroleum, natural gas, timber and other natural resources, and a total of roughly $500 million is pumped into the trust fund accounts each year. Norton’s plan, which came after a management consultant’s study, takes the BIA out of trust fund management and shifts those duties to the new office. But many of the BIA employees now involved in trust management will move to the new office, Norton said.
Dennis M. Gingold, a lawyer for the Indians, likened the planned changes to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” He noted that Native Americans make up 90 percent of the BIA’s workforce and said the BIA’s diminished role would cause mistrust.
“This is a desperate attempt to convince the judge that because they’ve proposed something, they’ve addressed the problem,” he said. “. . . This demonstrates [Norton] does not understand what needs to be done to manage the trust properly or to address issues unique to Native Americans.”
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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