House subcommittee: BIE schools suffer dangerous deferred maintenance, data errors and potential misuse of funds; tribes press for guaranteed funding

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers on the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations heard testimony Wednesday that Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools suffer widespread deferred maintenance, unreliable facility data and instances of possible misuse of federal COVID relief funds — problems that tribal leaders said require both more funding and structural fixes.

The subcommittee heard detailed findings from Kathleen Sedney, Assistant Inspector General for Audits, Inspections, and Evaluations at the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), and from Melissa Emery Aris, director of the Education, Workforce, and Income Security team at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Both witnesses described long‑running management weaknesses at BIE and Agency for Indian Affairs systems that track maintenance and spending.

Why it matters: testimony and reports presented at the hearing say unreliable facility records and improperly closed work orders have distorted the Bureau’s Facilities Condition Index (FCI), undermining decisions about which buildings to repair or replace. Separately, GAO flagged several million dollars in COVID‑era purchases and other transactions as high risk for fraud or misuse and said schools were not always monitored or investigated after those flags appeared.

Most important findings - OIG said BIE’s facility management system, Maximo, contains many inaccurate records: in a sampled set of work orders roughly 54% should have been closed but remained open; conversely, the contractor that BIE hired to clean up the data closed thousands of work orders that should not have been closed. OIG reported that contractor closed 89% of about 85,000 work orders it reviewed between September 2022 and…