Editorial
St. Petersburg Times
The federal courts have waited long enough for the U.S. government to sort
out its sorry management of the American Indian trust fund system.
Continuing problems with the accounting, security and administration of
Indian lands and money call for the job to be taken from the Interior
Department and given to a court-appointed receiver. Even if taken as a
temporary step, this move could speed the necessary reforms and restore
confidence in the government’s ability to manage the trust accounts.
The accounts date to the 1880s, when the government established trusts for
individual Indians in an attempt to break up the system of tribal lands.
But modern-day descendants claim the government mishandled $10-billion or
more in gas, oil and timber leases, thereby denying hundreds of thousands
of Indians of royalty income.
Three years ago, the federal judge overseeing a massive lawsuit Indians
brought against the government wrote: “It would be difficult to find a
more historically mismanaged federal program.” And despite time, money and
bureaucratic reform, the problems have not gone away.
It is senseless to tolerate this record any longer. U.S. District Judge
Royce Lamberth, who said last month he had been “duped” about the
government’s progress in reforming the trust, needs to remove this problem
from the political arena.
A receiver could start from scratch to determine what value of the trust
was lost, who is owed and how the trust accounts should be managed. The
government has lost credibility with Indian groups and the courts;
computer security of the trust funds is poor, and Lamberth slammed the new
accounting system as “a total failure.” Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s
idea to reconstitute the trust fund into a new government agency looks
less like progress than a stall to buy time.
Giving the job to an outside manager would not eliminate the need for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has a role to play in keeping broader
issues important to Indians on the national agenda. The receiver would
play a more limited role — cleaning up the trust fund within a specific
period of time, then handing off that new architecture for managing the
trusts to the BIA. The court could appoint a special monitor to oversee
the reforms and keep the process in public view. Continuing to haul
government officials back to court to explain the latest broken promise is
not a strategy for resolving the core issues of this longstanding case.
Let’s try something different.
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