The Future of National Health Care?
The Government Accountability Office released an audit report yesterday (requires Adobe) concerning the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in which GAO said that “after almost 20 years, key federal agencies still have not fully complied with the act.”
GAO explained that they “examined NAGPRA implementation in detail for eight key federal agencies with significant historical collections: Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and NPS; Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps); and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
NAGPRA was enacted November 16, 1990, Included in what GAO found during their audit, they wrote:
“Through fiscal year 2009, 55 percent of the human remains and 68 percent of the associated funerary objects that have been published in notices of inventory completion had been repatriated, according to agency data and GAO’s survey results. Agencies are required to permanently document their repatriations, but they are not required to compile and report that information to anyone. Only three agencies—the Corps, the Forest Service, and NPS— centrally track their repatriations. These three agencies, however, along with the other federal agencies that have published notices, generally do not report any of their data on repatriations to National NAGPRA or to Congress . . . .”
Don’t you just look forward to medical care in the future? Now really, don't you? Sheesh!