In fiscal year 1968, more than 9,000 of the Bureau's personnel and $138.2 million (55 percent of the Bureau's $250 million budget) went into the education function. HEW's Division of Public Health employed 5,740 people for Indian health services, with a $91.3 million appropriation. Thus two-thirds of the personnel and funds expended on Indian affairs that year by the principally involved agencies went into education and health services. (The total funds appropriated for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in fiscal year 1969 were $258.2 million; the amount requested in the Budget for fiscal year 1970 by the Bureau is $289.1 million, which primarily reflects a $14 million increase for education and a $20 million increase for adult vocational training, certain cuts being made in other items, chiefly the construction of buildings and utilities.)

It may be argued that the decentralized structure of the Bureau, as outlined above and seen on the accompanying charts A and B, is necessary for good management. But, in practice, it is management for checks, balances, caution, resistance and delays, and not for decisiveness and action. The "layering" and compartmentalizing, which require actions moving up and down to go sideways also, back and forth, on each layer, result inevitably in slowness, frustrations, and negativism, as well as a continuing Niagara of studies, assessments, opinions and reports. The Bureau in consequence is literally drowned in paperwork, while on the reservation level the Indians wait.

This cannot be, and is not, good management. In December, 1968, Leon Ovsiew, professor of educational administration at Temple University, analyzed the administrative structure, budgeting practices and certain personnel factors of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as they pertain to the education function, for the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education. His study was so perceptive in pointing out the root causes of the Bureau's structural defects that, although his report referred primarily to the educational function of the Bureau, certain excerpts from it, with the alteration of a few words, should be read and re-read as being relevant to the Bureau as a whole:

"The primary characteristic of a viable (Bureau organizational structure) is that leadership efforts should be both encouraged and rewarded. Though no one would be naive enough to believe that any structure alone can make leadership flourish, it is nevertheless true that structure can frustrate leadership. A good structure can do more: it can encourage good people with ideas to cast their fate with the organization for the rewards of accomplishment. In any event, if a structure actually hinders the exercise of leadership, it needs changing to a structure which encourages it. No principle of organization can be more certain.

"How does the present BIA structure constrain and impede the exercise of leadership? By the quite simple process of making every idea, every experimental hypothesis, every possible adaptive change (and every programatic or other action for decision) run the gauntlet of (area branch personnel, a general area director, Washington division personnel, and an assistant commissioner, all of whom possess authority over the specific reservation matter in question) and whose short budgets and spending leeways make new ideas less attractive than the non-postponable functions. Forced to use an influence pattern

for getting whatever consideration of their change-ideas they can, officials (wishing to move things along) must learn to lose more often than they win, and especially to lose the big ideas. It takes only a little empathy to understand the frustration this perception causes for people who know that little ideas can never hope to win the battle against the inadequacies * * *

"There is another, more subtle point about the uses of a decentralized structure. In theory, a major advantage of decentralization is that it permits a freerer exercise of political democracy. Opportunities exist when administrative decisions are made close to the point of their implementation for the people affected by them to affect the deci sions *** It would be satisfying to be able to note that such an advantage adheres in the BIA administrative structure. But the route upward through the echelons seems to be no less difficult than downward for personnel, at least on the things that matter most. The BIA philosophy of organization derogates the (grassroots Indians, specialists and coordinating administrator in favor of echelons of administrators and absentee specialists higher up).

"The BIA structure is designed more than most for stability. It is doubtful that very much could be done with or to the people in the organization, given the present structure, to encourage innovative practice *** One thing does seem for certain: the present structure not only serves to reward unaggressive behavior and docility but punishes, usually by transfer, those who persist in behaving like leaders. The reward system of BIA discourages leadership, on purpose. It is. therefore, not possible to conceive of change and improvement within the present structure." (Italics added.) These findings, to repeat, were addressed primarily to the organization of the Bureau's educational system, but they apply with equal vividness to the Bureau's entire structure. On the reservation level, where Indians are trying to participate constructively to help frame, design and execute programs to meet their problems, they are hamstrung and frustrated daily by an endless round of delays and negativism occasioned by the internal workings of the higher echelons of the Bureau. The effect is that the Indians cannot participate in making decisions for themselves, for in meaningful things, the decisions cannot be made at their level. Government protestations in support of the principle of self-determination notwithstanding, the important decisions must be, and are madeunder the present arrangement-in the echelons above the Indians.

Such a system, as noted, defeats the personnel within the system. There are undoubtedly weak, poor, and inefficient men within the Bureau. Some enter the system, especially at the area level, by patronage; some should never have been employed by the Bureau; some are poor because of inadequate training and orientation after they were emploved: and some were good originally but, after many frustrations and defeats, gave up. The Office of Inspection in the Commissioner's Office, which is charged with the obligation to "identify and correct any operational weakness which might reflect upon the efficiency or integrity of the Bureau," gives little evidence of ability or determination to carry out its mission. One of the scores of "weak nesses," with which it appears unable to cope, is the continued presence within the Bureau of key personnel who long since should have

been removed from it. The Commissioners themselves should bear a large portion of the blame for not having found the means by which to remove inadequate personnel. Indian children are being emotionally disabled for life by the ignorance of unfit people in the Bureau's educational system. Many members of Indian communities are driven to desperation, some even to suicide, as a result of ineptitude, indifference or lethargy on the part of a poor superintendent or area official. Yet the record of the 1960's contains documentation of Commissioner Nash turning down Indian appeals to relieve them of intolerable agency personnel by telling them that he would not remove a man while he was under fire, and of Commissioner Bennett answering tribal complaints of frustration and negativism with the retort that he was not interested in discussing "criticism of the BIA." The selfevident fact that the Commissioner and the Office of Inspection have not acted determinedly in this matter is an added reason for transferring the Bureau to the Executive Office of the Presidency, where some of the unspoken forces that presently account for the Commissioner's inhibitions, including the pressure of patronage demands and the rigid dicta of Civil Service-neither of which should be viewed as anything but evil when the lives and health of American citizens, and especially children, are at stake-can be better dealt with.

At the same time, it should be recognized that the Bureau contains many more persons with exceptional ability and talent and a high degree of dedication, when the Indians criticize them, they are, in truth, criticizing a structure that binds and frustrates its personnel. That such persons remain in the Bureau and continue to do their best is a testament to the intensity of their commitment. "Many, many inspired people in the service have lived in hope, and died in despair, trying their level best to help the Indian people take their rightful place in America," it will be recalled that W. W. Keeler told Secretary Udall in 1961, when his task force was about to begin its work.

Neither that task force, nor any of those that followed it, made the proposal which this study now believes is mandatory, namely that:

Wherever the present Bureau of Indian Affairs is positioned within the government, its structure must be thoroughly reorganized.

The form of that reorganization must satisfy two principal goals: (a) it must end the Bureau's present defects that have been noted above; and (b) it must achieve the transfer of a maximum of technical services, facilities and decisionmaking capabilities to the reservation level, face-to-face with the Indians.

At the present time, a decision for a meaningful proposal that originates after a meeting between the Indians and a branch officer on the reservation faces a long, torturous route: from the branch officer to the agency superintendent to the area branch officer to the area assistant director to the area director to the division in Washington to the Assistant Commissioner to the Commissioner, and perhaps higher still. Eventually, it starts down again, following the same zigzag route. Even this is a simplified version, for it may be sidetracked at any step along the way into the offices of other branches and to solicitors.

The recommendations made to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the self-examination of the Bureau in 1965-66 and those