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Tuesday September 24, 2002
Trust fund ailing for too long.
Editorial Billings Gazette What will it take to begin major reform of the trust fund that manages (read: mismanages) $500 million a year for Native Americans?
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth held Interior Secretary Gale Norton and a top aide in contempt for failing to fix oversight problems with the trust that handles royalty funds generated from Indian land.
This is not a new strategy for Lamberth as he tries to force the government to fix the trust. Three years ago, he held Norton’s predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt. His rulings are the only ones in modern history to hold Cabinet-level officials in contempt of court.
It is not that the government doesn’t know it has a multimillion dollar nightmare on its hands. Officials have acknowledged that major problems exist in the trust fund. And since 1996, the Interior Department has spent more than $600 million to comply with instructions from Lamberth and Congress. But the bookkeeping problems haven’t gone away.
In December, for example, Lamberth unplugged most of the Interior Department’s Internet connections because he said the government could not guarantee that hackers wouldn’t hack into the system and steal funds.
History of mismanagement
Congress created the trust fund in 1887, when it gave 90 million acres of tribal land to white homesteaders. The Indians were left 11 million acres and individual allotments ranging from 40 acres to 320 acres. The Interior Department was given the responsibility of tracking the Indians’ income from mining and grazing leases, timber harvesting and other activities on their land.
In 1996, the Indians sued, claiming that for more than a century the fund has been mismanaged, costing them up to $40 billion in lost income. Lamberth ordered the Interior Department in 1999 to fix the system.
Still no fix.
In a 29-day trial that ended in late February, Norton asked the court for more time. The judge refused to budge and has taken Norton and her department to task for their delaying tactics and refusing to comply with his instructions.
A blast from the bench
The judge’s outrage oozes from his 267-page opinion:
“The Department of Interior’s administration of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust has served as the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century.
“As the trustee-delegate of the United States, The Secretary of Interior does not know the precise number of IIM trust accounts that she is to administer and protect, how much money is or should be in the trust, or even the proper balance for each individual account.
“Because of the Secretary’s systemic failure as a trustee-delegate, the federal government regularly issues payments to beneficiaries – of their own money – in erroneous amounts.
“In fact, the Interior Department cannot provide an accurate accounting to the majority of the estimated 300,000 trust beneficiaries, despite a clear statutory mandate and the century-old obligation to do so. As the court observed more than two years ago, ‘it is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its purest form.'”
You get the idea.
Though Norton inherited this century-old mess, we urge her to apply all her energies and that of her staff to right this historic wrong as soon as possible.
