I covered this subject for years, and the Interior Department has done all it can to avoid accounting for billions owed to tribes and individual Indians.
During the Clinton Administration, they actually claimed that their records were tainted by the hantavirus, and pretended to ask NASA if they could borrow a space suit to retrieve the documents. I'm not kidding.
But things took a turn for the totally absurd when these gangsters stole the Presidency and inserted the very worst Secretary of the Interior this nation has ever seen in the form of Gale Norton. She repeatedly lied to Congress and to Judge Royce Lamberth on the subject, never met a deadline, never produced anything she was asked to produce, and got away with it thanks to John McCain's chairing of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.
My sources on the inside told me that the day Bush took over, all real work on the Indian trust subject ended and the subject fell in the lap of the legal and public relations teams. The Special Trustee, Tom Slonaker, was forced out within a year of their taking over. One of the few Interior employees committed to working on the project,
Sharon Blackwell, was kept "
in the hole" after September 11th for most of 2002, until she finally resigned.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has rifled through three Assistant Secretaries, but most of the time the leadership post has been vacant because the Bush Administration made it a requirement that the position be filled by someone who has "demonstrated support for the President," in other words donated millions to his campaign. They're hard to find.
There has been not one tangible result in six years in this case. I won't be a bit surprised to learn in thirty years that not one penny was spent on it during the Bush Administration, and that the funds were instead diverted into our various wars.