DOGE sets crosshairs on BIA funding

RAPID CITY—Once President Trump kept his promise about establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by Executive Order 14158 on January 20, 2025, and placed billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in charge of the department, deep political controversy was certain to ensue. Beyond this overall conflict, tribes have braced for the impact of DOGE cuts will have on BIA funding and services.

 

 

DOGE’s mission is to “modernize federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” DOGE hopes to achieve these objectives through:

• Regulatory Recissions: Eliminating unnecessary regulations
• Administrative Reductions: Consolidating overlaps and redundancy, reducing bureaucratic overhead.
• Cost Savings: addressing waste and fraud, eliminating hidden slush funds.

When ChatGPT is asked to give an example of the term “political football,” it provides the following: “Funding for tribal programs has become a political football in Washington—each party blames the other while communities suffer.” And so the historic political impact on BIA funding is common enough to be the go-to example. Although the DOGE website makes clear which BIA services will be cut and how much money will be saved for each cut or consolidation, the impact of these cuts on the people benefiting from these services is not addressed.

Attempts by NSNT to determine the precise BIA services in Rapid City on the DOGE chopping block did not go well. A phone number or address for the BIA suboffice in Rapid City, could not be found. The DOGE site indicates the Rapid City suboffice of the BIA Regional Office in Aberdeen will close, saving $53,911. A call to the Aberdeen Regional Office did not provide an answer, and NSNT was directed to a Washington DC Department of Interior media line, which when called resulted in about a half an hour of wasted time and provided no answer. A media inquiry to the BIA, into the legitimacy of the DOGE efficiency cuts, resulted in the very inefficiency DOGE is attempting to reduce and eliminate.

Other BIA services defunded in South Dakota are the BIA office at Fort Thompson ($58,976), the BIA office at Sisseton ($180,008), and the National Indian Gaming Commission in Rapid City ($43,938), for a total funding and services reduction of $336,833.

Down in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, DOGE will close a BIA Osage Agency suboffice, effective September 30, 2025. Unlike the suboffice in Rapid City, the purpose of this Osage office was available: it managed the Osage Mineral State, oversaw oil and gas development, processed permits, and ensured regulations compliance. The projected DOGE savings are $166,134 annually.

Because DOGE is not forthcoming about how it will reassign the energy management duties of Osage Agency, or if it even will, Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear is not sitting on his hands. He has told the media that the tribe’s Secretary of Development will seek alternative office space for the agency over the next five months.

Tribal Chairman and Presidents across the country are alarmed by the uncertainty of the restructuring. They know the dollar amounts being cut, but the fate of the services and employees is up in the air.

“We don’t see the full effect just yet,” said Blackfeet Tribal Chairman Rodney Gervais Jr. “And I know there’s been a lot of cuts throughout the nation. Within our tribal programs, of course we’re getting ready.”

Oglala Sioux Tribal Attorney Mario Gonzalez has pointed out that BIA and Indian Health Service funding is not just a Congressional allocation, it is very often treaty obligated, and certainly treaty obligated for the Lakota of South Dakota.

The total amount of BIA defunding by DOGE has not been tabulated from the DOGE website, although all of the information is available for each individual cut. The entire BIA budget is just one quarter of one percent of the federal budget. President Trump’s stated goal is to reach $2 trillion at which point every household will receive a $5,000 DOGE dividend check. DOGE savings are now at $140 billion, or seven percent of the way to the stated goal. USAID is the most noted agency audited by DOGE, and its pre-DOGE budget of $40 billion has been reduced to $6.8 billion.

At present, and since all treaties and agreements were originally signed, the level of obligated funding to the 574 federally recognized tribes is underfunded by Congress, and is then incorrectly allocated, and then incorrectly distributed. Given that history, it is not surprising that tribes are alarmed by the additional DOGE cuts. when before DOGE even existed, they considered Congressional funding chronically inadequate.

A legal battle looms between the Democrats and this administration. The Democrats seek to establish once and for all that Congress controls the purse strings, and that a president cannot run end-arounds like Trump did in his first term to sit on Congressional approved Ukraine funds, which resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. Later Trump redirected Pentagon funds to the southern border when Congress would not provide all the funding he wanted to build the wall he had promised. This resulted in his second impeachment.

Like Nixon before him, Trump argues for a strong presidency based upon the mandate of the November election. Nixon argued same after he handed South Dakota Senator George McGovern the worst defeat in presidential Election Day history. Nixon was brought down by Watergate, and already twice impeached in his first term for challenging Congressional authority, Trump still survived where Nixon did not. He now has a higher popularity rating than he has ever had before, and if he wins the legal challenge to freeze or redirect federal allocation based upon arguments he has presidential and emergency powers, tribes will continue to fret over the impact on BIA funding.

(James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of OST. Contact him at skindiesel@msn.com)

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