McCaleb defends Norton on trust fund

FROM THE ARCHIVE

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MONDAY, JULY 16, 2001

Although a court monitor last week blasted his boss for delaying resolution of the trust fund debacle, Assistant Secretary Neal McCaleb on Sunday defended the Bush administration's scant record on fixing the broken system.

Making his first appearance on television just 11 days into his tenure as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, McCaleb said Secretary of Interior Gale Norton has taken positive steps to ensure the government is meeting its trust responsibilities. He said a new office Norton has created will provide American Indians with an accurate accounting of the monies they are owed -- a task two federal courts have ordered the government to complete.

"What do we intend to do to address the court orders? We intend to comply with them strictly and promptly," he said on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. "Is it a big undertaking? You bet it's a big undertaking."

But even though Norton, in one of her first official acts, approved a controversial plan to conduct a statistical sampling of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts with almost no research into the project, McCaleb instead laid blame on the previous administration for the flap.

"This [Bush] administration was following those suggestions when we came in," he explained. "So the criticism does not focus on the activities that Secretary Norton has done to give an historical accounting and that's the direction we're going in."

Joseph S. Kieffer III, however, discovered otherwise since being named court monitor by a federal judge in April. In his first report -- which was released last Wednesday -- Kieffer not only criticized Norton for approving the sampling plan but also for delaying what an appeals court told her to do in February.

"The present administration’s decisions have caused further delay in the historical accounting process," wrote Kieffer in a 50-page report.

To be sure, Norton's poor decision-making pales in comparison to the one and one-half years of stall tactics Kieffer documents of the Clinton administration. In December 1999, US District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the government to provide an historical accounting.

But Kieffer says Clinton officials, including former Assistant Secretary Kevin Gover, hatched the statistical sampling plan only to delay the accounting while they appealed Lamberth's ruling. The Clinton administration, however, escaped defeat a second time and just weeks after Norton took office, an appeals court upheld Lamberth's ruling.

Now, Norton is left to complete what McCaleb described yesterday as a very difficult and time-consuming process.

"We've got to reconstruct the records for 300,000 accounts that go back one hundred years as historically accurate as we can," he said. "We have to authenticate those to the greatest extent possible with the primary documents -- many of which exist, but some of which do not exist."

"We're going to proceed as expeditiously as is consistent with authenticity, accuracy and equity," he promised.

Within two months, Norton's new office will come up with an historical accounting plan and will consult with account holders and Congress on how to proceed.

Relevant Links:
Washington Journal - http://www.cspan.org/journal
Office of the Special Trustee - http://www.ost.doi.gov
Trust Management Improvement Project - http://www.doi.gov/bia/trust/tmip.htm
Indian Trust: Cobell v. Norton - http://www.indiantrust.com