The Denver Post
When she became U.S. Interior Secretary, Gale Norton vowed to tackle a task that bedeviled her predecessors: resolving the Indian trust fund mess. Critics withheld their fire on this issue, knowing that Norton couldn’t immediately fix a problem that has festered for 115 years.
While Norton can’t be berated for mistakes others committed decades ago, she should be held responsible for what’s happened on her watch. In this regard, a court report released last week is extremely troubling. For the first time, blame for the government’s foot-dragging landed directly on Norton’s doorstep.
Five years ago, American Indians sued Interior for grossly mismanaging trust funds that the government handles on their behalf. During the Clinton administration, Interior officials repeatedly misled the federal judge hearing the case, Royce Lamberth, about the government’s progress in sorting out the mess. So in 1999, Lamberth appointed a court monitor to keep tabs on Interior’s doings, and ordered Interior to file quarterly reports with the court.
In its most recent report, Interior claimed to have made substantial progress. But last week, the court monitor ripped Interior’s top bosses for telling the judge untruths.
Contrary to Interior’s rosy claims, court monitor Joseph S. Keiffer III said the department’s efforts to clean up the data and implement a new computer system “have no hope of near-term completion.” A statistical sampling plan to account for missing revenues is “still at ground zero.” Despite Norton’s claims to have “streamlined” the clean-up, “no one is in charge of trust reform.”
Keiffer told Judge Lamberth that highly placed Interior officials unduly pressured department employees to rubber-stamp a report they knew was inaccurate. To their immense credit, the Interior employees refused.
But Norton signed and shipped the report anyway. As a result, Norton – a former member of the Colorado Bar Association and a presidential appointee – gave a federal court a document that Keiffer says was “untruthful, inaccurate, and incomplete.” Such shameful behavior is something Coloradans never expected from their former attorney general.
In the past five years, Interior has spent about $614 million on Indian trust reform, and recently got another $150 million from Congress for the project next year. Yet if Keiffer is right, Interior has almost nothing positive to show for it. What the heck is Interior doing with all that dough if it’s not fixing the problem? And if Norton has gotten very bad advice, why hasn’t she dumped the slackers and brought on some folks who can do the job?
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