Turf War Blamed for Indian Trust Problems

Bureaucratic mistrust and infighting stymied efforts to improve the Interior Department’s management of royalties from Native American lands, an internal investigation found.

The report, by the Interior Department’s inspector general, said the turf wars led to false information being given to Congress and a judge in a lawsuit over the mismanaged Indian money. The mismanagement also led to the destruction of e-mails that should have been saved as potential evidence, the report says.

The inspector general said, in a report filed with the court late Monday, that any misdeeds were unintentional, because the department is so “blinded by clouded judgment and crippled by distrust, a singular sinister or conspiratorial plan is impossible to construct.”

The department has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to fix its management of 11 million acres of Indian land entrusted to the department.

Interior oversees oil, gas, coal, timber, grazing and other royalties from the lands. Proceeds are supposed to be paid to the Indian landowners, but Native Americans who sued the department in 1996 claim mismanagement has cost 300,000 Indian landowners more than $10 billion. The lawsuit has contributed to problems, the inspector general said, angering employees so much that “they cannot see or think clearly to make a correct decision. Every effort is thwarted by internal discord, distrust and a dysfunctional reluctance to assume ownership.”

Last year, a court-appointed watchdog filed a series of scathing reports, chastising Interior for misleading the court about the progress of trust reform and failing to inform the judge that a key accounting system was a failure.

Interior Solicitor William G. Myers III asked the inspector general to investigate the claims.

The inspector general said the investigation was hampered by the refusal of key officials from the Clinton administration--including former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, his chief of staff and others--to cooperate.

The report said that employees have repeatedly sought to protect their bureaus first, then the department as a whole and, lastly, the Indian landowners.