After more than a decade of litigation, U.S. officials announced today that the federal government has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims that it grossly mismanaged Indian trust accounts.
The potential settlement, which must still be approved by Congress and the courts, would bring a close to the long-running Cobell Indian trust case, and would result in payments to roughly 300,000 individual Indian trust accounts. It would also create a $2 billion program to consolidate ownership of Indian trust lands.
The class action, brought in 1996 by Elouise Cobell, alleged that the Interior Department had been failing for more than a century to properly disburse payments from a trust fund set up to manage revenues from Indian land. Cobell had originally sought $58 billion in the case, but last year, Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the government was only liable for $455.6 million.
The settlement was announced on Dec. 8 at a joint press conference with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Justice Department officials.
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. urged Congress to act quickly to approve the settlement. “Between the settlement and the trust reform measures that the secretary is announcing today, this administration is taking concrete steps to redefine the government’s relationship with Native Americans,” Holder said.
Has anyone in the Interior Dept. been fired for costing us $1.4 billion?
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen | December 08, 2009 at 07:20 PM