Interior Mismanagement: Custer's Revenge?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by Sean Paige

Although certainly not the first or worst outrage ever visited upon American Indian peoples, the federal government's historically slipshod management of Indian programs and trust funds must rank high among the many injustices they've suffered and endure to this day.

More than three months after two Clinton-administration Cabinet members -- Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and outgoing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- were held in contempt of court by a federal judge for failing to turn over Indian Trust Funds records, a court-appointed investigator, Alan Balaran, revealed that little had been done by the government to correct the state of disarray and "patently substandard conditions" into which the records have fallen. His findings make it amply clear why the records can't be turned over by Babbitt and Rubin -- they'd have to be delivered to court in a dumpster.

At a Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, office in Anadarko, Okla., one of 108 separate locations where trust-fund records are stashed, Balaran reported finding trust-fund documents stored in wooden sheds, files spilling over and documents stuffed in unmarked boxes and strewn among old truck tires. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth appointed Balaran to assess the records as part of a lawsuit brought by tribes who allege that the feds for decades mishandled personal and tribal trust-fund accounts totaling more than $2.5 billion in lease revenues, royalties and other court settlements. Lamberth has said that he had "never seen more egregious misconduct" by the federal government than he has in this case.

After his inspection, Balaran asked Lamberth to order the safeguarding of documents against further destruction, saying that without it the "opportunity for a meaningful accounting will be forever lost." BIA officials, meanwhile, say they are working to ensure that the records are properly stored, citing an Interior Department memorandum dated June 2 that ordered all its agencies to preserve any trust records they keep.

In an effort to right decades of wrongs, the BIA is hurrying to develop a new computerized system for managing trust-fund accounts -- although the General Accounting Office, or GAO, recently warned that the $150 million crash effort itself is in danger of disarray. In its understandable rush to bring the system online, Interior may be shortcutting necessary planning on the project, warns the GAO, heading down a road to ruin followed by other big-buck computerization efforts that have crashed -- including at the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Department of Education and the IRS.

But if it's looking for case studies on how not to manage such modernizations, the department need look no further than its own Bureau of Land Management, which just announced that it was pulling the plug on a central component of its own 16-year, $400 million computer-modernization project.