WASHINGTON – You know it’s going to be a heavy discussion when the words that frame it include Paul Volcker, Vine Deloria, “fungible” and George W. Bush.
But the reorganization of federal agencies under President Bush has become one of the heaviest issues in Indian country. This is primarily because of a BIA reorganization that tribal leaders and an Indian-specific labor union have continued to resist.
But in addition, the Indian Health Service is undergoing consolidation. Almost two dozen other agencies, some of them with direct roles to play in Indian country, have been consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, courtesy of a Supreme Court decision over Navajo coal that wrote an end to implied federal liability for tribal trust assets under statutory law, as well as the Cobell litigation over Individual Indian Monies accounts, the very nature of the trust relationship between tribes and the federal government is changing shape, from a kind of guided self-determination with the government as a fiduciary guarantor – toward a self-determination under which market discipline would be the main guarantor of tribal profit, with the government demoted to a custodial position over properties and rights.
Whatever their ultimate degree of implementation, these may represent the most far-reaching changes in Native affairs since the self-determination laws of more than 25 years ago.
That is where Paul Volcker comes in. His contribution of $600,000 will support Rand Graduate School studies on the most effective reform and reorganization of the federal government.
Now Volcker is about as “inside” as inside gets in Washington policy circles. As chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 – 1987, he is credited with taming inflation. Since then he has chaired important committees on administrative reform in the federal government. He has something of an elder statesman’s status on the subject.
Only now has Volcker, 75, decided the time is right to plow a fortune of his own into government reform. There is a reason for that. At the time of his donation this summer, according to a Washington Post report, “Volcker said there is a greater appetite for reorganizing government now than he has seen in decades.”
The signal here is that the Bush administration’s efficiency-in-government initiative is making headway, such headway that tribes may want to be on the right side of it.
The administration’s recent government reform initiatives take their cues from the President’s Management Agenda. As government planning documents go, the agenda is impressive. It emphasizes results while pouring scorn on the usual practice of making promises. It demands accountability for all decisions by government delegates and performance measures for all programs, and focuses closely on taxpayers as clients who deserve better results for their “investment.” The goal therefore is more effective expenditure of government funds, a winning appeal at a time of projected budget deficits.
The President’s Management Agenda is taken most seriously throughout the federal government. Its “enterprise approach” to improving government services is being implemented by now in every cabinet department and at many, perhaps most, agencies within the respective departments.
Indian country has not been left out. The President’s Management Agenda is behind the “One Department” initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in turn consolidating the Indian Health Service under its director, Dr. Charles Grim, and forging a performance-based grant making approach at Indian-specific grant making agencies of the federal government. It is forcing the pace and shape of reform at the BIA (with an assist from the court in Cobell, it must be noted) and practically dictating regulatory changes at other agencies that may interact with Indian country.
The BIA’s Jerry Gidner, point man for its internal reorganization process, said the President’s Management Agenda has come up in a guiding capacity at the bureau’s reorganization meetings, especially when the task at hand is to link budgets to program performance measures, a dominant theme of the presidential agenda.
In this political climate, with an “enterprise approach” to efficiency in federal spending on a tear through government agencies, the government’s primary Indian agency sticks out like a sore thumb for its inefficiencies.
This is no fault of tribes, but they fear paying for it anyway. To the contrary, government officials insist, the BIA reorganization will benefit tribes through more direct services and better accountability for decisions. As for encouraging the BIA to whither on the vine as other agencies adopt its tasks, the official most directly involved in the reorganization says it simply isn’t up for consideration. Jerry Gidner, chief of staff to Aurene Martin, Interior’s acting assistant secretary for Indian affairs, has stepped up to lead the operational end of the reorganization.
“I’ve been in meetings [on reorganization] for almost a year,” Gidner said. ” ? There’s never been any discussion of eliminating BIA or of merging BIA under the OST.” The discussion he does remember entailed strengthening the BIA by training bureau employees, he added.
Nonetheless, with one tier of the reorganization completed (at least on the organizational chart), it is this OST, or Office of the Special Trustee on trust funds, that has gotten the attention of Indian country thus far. Congress created the office within the Interior Department in 1994, as a way of implementing the reforms mandated in the Indian Trust Management Reform Act of the same year. But implementation has encountered one roadblock after another, and meanwhile the Cobell litigation has forced Interior to reform or face a court-ordered receivership, with repercussions beyond all telling at this point.
Congress has also recognized the gravity of the hour for Interior and the trust funds. In consequence, the lion’s share of a record increase in Indian funding for Interior went to the OST. Keller George, president of United South and Eastern Tribes and a member of the Oneida Indian Nation’s Men’s Council, spelled out the concerns of many Indian people in testimony before Congress last spring:
“? This internal struggle has become obvious in the past several months, as the re-organization process has been pushed into its initial phase. USET agrees that trust and other functions need to be separated, however, in the BIA’s reorganization structure two competing organizations have developed. The OST and the BIA must compete against each other for authority, resources, and manpower ?
“New funding must be provided to the BIA for this reorganization process, while other programs should operate as intended without interference from budget restraints due to reorganization.”
As things stand now, with a first tier of the reorganization completed, further BIA reorganization will go forward without further tribal consultation, barring of course a court injunction against it as both the Navajo Nation and Indian Educators Federation have threatened.
Gidner said tribes will be invited to meetings “on how things are going to look in their region” of the reorganized BIA. ” ? Some things won’t change.”
It seems likely that tribes will continue to resist the Bush reorganization. It isn’t clear whether or not this resistance has a future, or what form it may take aside from a court challenge (which the Navajo Nation is still preparing).
One of the worst-case scenarios is that tribes could end up defending a clutch of jobs in Albuquerque, a handful of grants in Syracuse, all the while losing ground on the efficiencies that could turn BIA services into something better. Administrative efficiencies of the kind advocated in the president’s management agenda are not altogether dissimilar from private sector gains in efficiency that have empowered corporate advances all the way from McDonald’s to Wal-Mart. While comparisons between private sector success stories and government service initiatives won’t go far, at least the administration is talking about the only investments that would be “fungible” to underdeveloped communities such as we find in Indian country, investments that would “stick” where applied; training, education, and the human capital of new skill sets knowledge and capacities.
At the same time, consolidations and reorganizations that start from a stand point of economic efficiency in Indian service organizations will almost inevitably reduce the “Indian branding” of the BIA, IHS and other Indian-specific federal agencies. It would likely steer tribal clients in the direction of programs that wouldn’t know Indian culture or communities from the wind.
For the past century, in order to resist the strongest possible pressures to assimilate and sacrifice their own distinct cultures in the process, tribes have emphasized the cultural differences between one another and their separateness from others.
This doctrine and treaty right of tribal separatism has left several administrative legacies. In terms of intertribal relations with the federal government, it has mandated an area office structure whose inherent inefficiencies, with everyone running their own separate local support programs, have been exposed in spades by the current trust management reform litigation. In terms of tribal relations with others who rely on the federal government, tribal separatism has inflated the importance of single points of contact for Indians in federal agencies.
But as no less an authority than Vine Deloria has noted, tribal cultures have survived, they will survive, and the time has now come when Indians can afford to recognize the similarities amongst their tribes and cultures. Deloria doesn’t go so far, but may this notice of similarities extend to the Native kinship with other Americans?
That’s the implication of a “One Department” IHS and other reorganizing initiatives that centralize federal power and disperse Indian program funding.
But this centralization of authority must be for the purpose of more directly serving Native people, instead of functioning as centralization often has in the past for Indian people – as a prelude to more efficient dispossession.
Otherwise, by most accounts to date, Hoopa Valley Chairman Clifford Marshall will have had the last word for many tribes in his remarks in May before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Describing the vision for incremental trust fixes at Hoopa Valley, Marshall said the trust resource management problems that have spurred the reorganization “will never be implemented if it costs our tribes our right of self-determination and self-governance.”
