US Department of the Interior

[RTH10260]

Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered
Former staff have criticized the interior department for ignoring the risk of fraud after the Trump administration ceased scrutiny of a $59m fund for nuclear survivors, which is now depleted

Pete McKenzie
Mon 5 Jun 2023 11.00 BST

Former staff have lashed the US Department of the Interior for failing to predict that a 2017 decision to lift oversight from a $59m trust fund for Pacific Islanders displaced by American nuclear testing would lead to the fund’s exhaustion through mismanagement and alleged fraud.

Tom Bussanich, who in 2017 was a senior official in the department’s Office of Insular Affairs, said that he “would have bet money that there would have been issues with the trust fund and that the money would have been wasted”. Allen Stayman, a former director of the Office of Insular Affairs, dismissed the office as “the agency of acquiescence”.

Meanwhile, confidential bank documents reviewed by the Guardian reveal red flags that could have alerted the department to potential issues had it been scrutinising the fund, including the transfer of millions of dollars to two personal checking accounts over which the fund’s trustees had no oversight.

Together, the criticism and confidential documents are likely to increase the pressure the interior department faces for its role in the fund’s exhaustion, which left thousands of nuclear survivors and their descendants bereft.

The US government established the fund in the 1980s to support displaced residents of Bikini Atoll, a small reef in the Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands which the US left uninhabitable after it tested 23 nuclear weapons there between 1946 and 1958. Until recently, the fund provided several million dollars each year to a council that oversaw the displaced Bikinians, helping to provide housing, food and education in a country where the median income is $9,600 and almost half of households skip meals due to lack of money.

In 2016, however, Anderson Jibas was elected mayor of the Bikinian council and began pushing the interior department to hand over control of the fund. In 2017, Douglas Domenech, who Donald Trump had appointed as assistant interior secretary, announced that the department would hand over control of the fund, which by then held $59m, to “restore trust and ensure that sovereignty means something”.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the fund had been whittled down to about $100,000, largely through extravagant spending by Jibas on projects including land development in Hawaii, new ships and planes, and an apartment complex in the Marshall Islands.

Annual bank statements reviewed by the Guardian show that some of the money was disbursed directly from the trust fund to the vendors with whom Jibas and other local officials were negotiating. Because those disbursements were direct, they allowed the fund’s trustees to exercise a measure of oversight.




more details at link https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... department

[Slim Cognito]

Because of course it was.

[RTH10260]

the original NYT article (should have posted earlier)

$59 Million, Gone: How Bikini Atoll Leaders Blew Through U.S. Trust Fund
The Trump administration lifted spending limits on the fund, which aids descendants of people forced to leave the coral reef because of U.S. nuclear testing.

By Pete McKenzie
May 3, 2023

The golden sand of Bikini Atoll is laced with plutonium. The freshwater is poisoned with strontium. The coconut crabs contain hazardous levels of cesium.




https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/worl ... -fund.html
gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/worl ... =url-share