Word: bia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Deer, Assistant Secretary of the Interior and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A ferocious appropriations bill passed last month by the Senate, outdoing an only slightly less severe offering by the House, slashes the bureau's $1.7 billion budget a third. Deer has announced that the BIA may lay off up to 4,000 of its 12,000 employees by month's end, the most drastic personnel cut currently being contemplated by any federal agency. Just as important, the Senate bill targets moneys that bulwark greater tribal autonomy. Says Kurt Russo, coordinator of the Treaty Task Force...
...most of the decade, legislators have maintained the budget affecting America's 555 recognized Indian tribes at a constant level. Deploring the inefficiency of the BIA, through which most Indian-earmarked money flows, Congress has attempted to funnel more money directly through it to the tribes. This year, however, fueled partly by Republican budget-cutting fervor and partly by what some call a longstanding antipathy toward tribal rights on the part of a powerful Senator, Washington's Slade Gorton, it ripped up the playbook. "We've never seen cuts like these," says Christopher Stearns, Democratic counsel to the House Subcommittee...
...downsizing of the BIA's bureaucracy bothers Indian advocates far less than the cuts in money earmarked for tribal governments. Tribes' abilities to fight crime, provide sanitation, repair roads and administer dozens of other basic services would be endangered. The federal housing program that might have helped the Little Boy family would be cut 67%. The Agriculture Department's food program for Indians is scheduled to be folded into the food-stamp system, to the Indians' disadvantage. The advocates fear that the cuts will not just shatter the dreams of individual Native Americans like Little Boy but also cripple Washington...
...that under Congress's new balanced-budget dispensation, all of government must become smaller, and Native Americans must sacrifice like other Americans. Says Senator Gorton, who as chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing Interior Department funding wrote some of the most drastic legislation: "To give more to the BIA would, bluntly, have required us to give less to the national parks and cultural institutions which are our national heritage for everyone." This he refuses...
...argument for equal distribution of pain may be seriously misguided in this case, for several reasons. The first is that the BIA, which makes up 26% of the Interior Department's budget, would absorb 45% of the department's overall reductions. The second has to do with the Indians' abject destitution. Despite the arrival of gambling facilities on reservations, which has enriched a handful of tribes and made a few dozen more comfortable, a third of the country's 2 million Native Americans live below the poverty line. On the reservations, where per capita income averages $4,500, half...