by Bill McAllister
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
The Denver Post
WASHINGTON – Interior Secretary Gale Norton has been handed another failing grade from the lawyer who has been monitoring her department’s effort to clean up the more than 300,000 trust accounts it holds for American Indians.
Joseph S. Kieffer of Washington last week handed that assessment to the federal judge who appointed him. Kieffer’s highly critical report got little attention because of the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But those who read the 40-page report found that Kieffer had little
compassion for the Bush administration’s efforts to win more time to address
the issues that the Colorado-based Native American Rights Fund of Boulder
first raised five years ago in its lawsuit over the accounts.
“The cry that “it didn’t happen on our watch’ can no longer provide a
defense for this administration,” Kieffer said, sharply attacking Norton’s
handling of the case. He had questioned her actions in previous reports but
had reserved his strongest criticism for the Clinton administration.
This time Kieffer quoted the pledges by Norton and Bureau of Indian Affairs
Director Neil McCaleb to make trust reform a priority. “The major fallacy in
these pronouncements is that the Interior defendants have had time to bring
about trust reform,” he said.
Norton is relying on and defending the same people who advised former
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt during the previous administration, Kieffer
noted. “If the secretary of Interior and her appointees have asked the right
questions . . . that would appear required in light of DOI’s and BIA’s
history of mismanagement and recalcitrance . . . they have been given the
wrong answers or choose to ignore the true answers or unquestioningly
accepted the absence of any answers.”
No less than Paul Moorehead, the senior Republican aide on the Senate Indian
Affairs Committee, appeared to agree with the criticism, Kieffer said. “The
Indians’ perspective of this administration is that we’ve done little more
than shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” Moorehead told the
monitor. “The luxury of time is not available for this administration,” Moorehead
said in an interview. While the Clinton administration “lurched from crisis
to crisis,” Indians expect the Bush administration to resolve the lawsuit,
he said.
Norton declined to be interviewed, but Stephanie Hanna, her spokeswoman,
said the Bush administration soon will respond to the report. “This
administration feels we are taking the right steps,” Hanna said.
Kieffer couldn’t disagree more. “The plea that this administration must be
given more time to institute its strategies and management plans over trust
reforms rings hollow,” the monitor said.
The underlying problem is that the Bush administration’s leaders didn’t take
enough time to examine the problems before they took office, and they still
haven’t asked the right questions, Kieffer said. The BIA’s inability to
manage the trust accounts, which hold funds the government collected for oil
and gas leases on Indian lands, has been documented for decades.
“The future and some of the past trust reform decisions are the
responsibility of the present administration,” Kieffer said. “Its
representatives have stated they are focusing on the future. But that future
has been irrevocably affected by the seven months of this administration’s
decisions on trust reform. . . .”
“Despite all of the Interior defendants’ positive public pronouncements, the
required high-level political and institutional will to bring about critical
internal trust reform management and systems corrections has not been
observed to date by most concerned parties,” Kieffer said. “Without
additional high-level management reorganization and major resource and
personnel reallocation and, potentially, other leadership solutions, reform
of trust reform . . . will come slowly, if at all.”
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