A Computer Shutdown Plays Havoc at Interior

By TIMOTHY EGAN

After a 10-week court-ordered shutdown of nearly all its computer communications, the Interior Department said yesterday that it had restored some of them, bringing e- mail back to government scientists, Web service to national parks - and payments to nearly 40,000 American Indians.

The blanket electronic closing of a department that manages everything from seashores in New England to Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky stemmed from a problem that has been out of sight of much of official Washington but has played havoc with the lives of millions of people who depend on an agency that is landlord to one-eighth of the United States.

A federal district judge ordered the department on Dec. 5 to shut down its entire computer system, saying it could not safeguard the accounting system that manages money for Indians.

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, who is hearing the largest class-action suit ever filed by Indians, has already found that the government mismanaged Indian money for more than a century. In the process of a second trial, to determine whether Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton should be held in contempt for failing to comply with past orders on cleaning up the department, the judge found that Interior's Web sites were vulnerable to computer hacking.

In court in Washington yesterday, Secretary Norton promised Judge Lamberth that checks were on the way to thousands of Indians and said that about 40 percent of the department's Web sites were safe enough from hackers to reopen. The other major Interior Web sites remain offline.

To Indians who live in cities and on the reservations in the West, and depend on the $500 million in annual income that the department manages for them as part of a historic trust, the promises have a hollow ring, some of them said.

"I've watched them jump around for Enron (news/quote) while I haven't received so much as a single word about the money they owe me," said Rosemary Pimms, a Yakama Indian who lives in Seattle on the royalty payments that the government manages for her. "Nothing new there: the Indian is always last in line."

In Oklahoma, New Mexico and Washington state, which have large tribal populations, the cutoff of royalty payments, which come yearly, quarterly or monthly, put some families in danger of losing their homes.

"The house payment is the one we're most worried about now," said Billy Wolfe, who lives in a trailer with his wife, Christine, in Lamar, Okla. The couple depend on $450 a month in royalty income that the government manages for them. They have not received a check for three months, and there is a lien on the trailer, Mr. Wolfe said.

The Indians point out that the checks are not government handouts, but money owed individual Indians from land leased to outside business interests and managed by the Interior Department.

There are more than 500,000 such accounts, though the bulk of the money goes to 43,000 Indians who get regular royalty checks ranging from a few dollars to several thousand. The tribes say the government has lost up to $100 billion over the last century because of mismanagement and poor accounting.

"The way these people have been treated recently is an outrage," said Representative Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, whose district is 21 percent Indian. "It's just been a huge injustice. There are people out there living day to day, month to month on these checks, and the pace from Interior has been like molasses in winter."

Some tribes, including the Blackfeet, the Oglala Sioux and the Navajo, have made emergency funds available from their tribal welfare accounts to individual Indians.

They say they are furious with Secretary Norton. "Where I live, in Glacier County, Mont., home of the Blackfeet Nation, one of the 25 poorest counties in the United States, I can tell you that many people depend on these payments for the bare necessities of life," Elouise Cabell said in testimony before Congress last week.

Ms. Cabell, a former banker who is a member of the Blackfeet Nation, initiated the lawsuit six years ago. She says the way the government manages Indian money is "a national disgrace."

Interior officials said yesterday that they should be able to pay about half of what the Indians are owed from the computer shutdown and would work to make up the full amount in coming months.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Mrs. Pimms said.

The accounts date from the 1880's, when the government tried to break up the tribal land ownership system and awarded allotments of land to individual Indians. These lands were then managed by the government, and usually leased to gas, oil or timber companies. As with many trusts, the funds are given to descendants as the oldest generations die.

While most of the Interior computer shutdown has been felt in Indian Country, outdoor enthusiasts have been upset at the loss of Web access. Complaints from people planning vacations to national parks, or trying to get permits to float rivers on federal land, or simply trying to find out the status of bird species from the Fish and Wildlife Service, have been pouring into the department, officials said.

The shutdown has disrupted recruiting for summer firefighters and studies on wetlands and endangered species, and has forced thousands of government workers back to an era of typewriters and endless paper forms.

"We are frustrated because we don't have e-mail between employees, but the public is frustrated because this whole link has been cut off," said John Wright, a spokesman for the department.

Even with the National Park Service Web site scheduled to open within a day, an Interior agency that manages even more land - the Bureau of Land Management - will remain offline indefinitely, as will the Fish and Wildlife Service and the department's general site, officials said.

The Indians are trying to force the government to set up a proper accounting system for the trust funds, and to repay beneficiaries who may have lost money over the last century. The accounts have been so mismanaged, tribal members say, that they do not comply with even the basic standards of running private trusts.

When President Clinton was in office, Judge Lamberth found Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin in contempt for their handling of the trust fund records, and the government paid a $600,000 fine.

In ruling three years ago for the Indians, Judge Lamberth wrote, "It would be difficult to find a more historically mismanaged federal program." His ruling was upheld last year by a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, which wrote, "The trusts at issue here were created over a hundred years ago, and have been mismanaged nearly as long." 1 Editorial: Contempt at Interior September 19, 2002

Accounting failures in the private sector have been big news lately. But the granddaddy of accounting failures belongs to the public sector - the federal government's handling of money held in trust for more than 300,000 Native Americans.

The government gave allotments of land to various Indian tribes around the turn of the century, but kept control of the property, leasing it out for mining, lumber operations and ranching. The revenue was theoretically held in trust. Yet as Judge Royce Lamberth of Federal District Court observes, "The Department of Interior's administration of the Individual Indian Money trust has served as the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century." This week, Judge Lamberth found Interior Secretary Gale Norton guilty of civil contempt of court for her department's failure to straighten out the mess.

Ms. Norton, the third cabinet official to be cited for contempt in this ongoing debacle, inherited the problems from her predecessors. The government has always preferred to hope that the whole issue would go away - in part because the amount owed to the Native Americans could by now total billions of dollars. But nobody really knows. The physical records have fallen into disrepair, been lost or, in some cases, been purposely destroyed. According to Judge Lamberth, the Interior Department doesn't seem to have made much effort to improve things, creating the illusion of developing a new plan for a historical accounting of the trust money while doing nothing of the kind.

The justice of the Native Americans' claim for an accurate accounting of money owed them is almost self-evident. Perhaps the most damning part of Judge Lamberth's decision came at the end, a sentence tinged with sadness and anger. "I may have life tenure," he wrote, "but at the rate the Department of Interior is progressing that is not a long enough appointment." Over time, many of the Native Americans who have hoped for a just accounting from the Interior Department have discovered how accurate Judge Lamberth's words really are. Lifetimes have come and gone, and still nothing meaningful has been done. It is time to change that.

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