Bruce Babbitt was a brand new secretary of the interior back in January 1993 when he testified before the Senate that the mess previous secretaries had made of the Indian trust fund program would be cleaned up within 60 days. The record shows the Senate erupted in laughter.

Babbitt testified again the other day, this time in federal court. He told the judge the department was “almost there” and would need just a little more time “to get this problem nailed down and solved.” How much little more time? Several years.

No one laughed.

Mr. Babbitt may be losing his knack for comedy, but his aptitude for overseeing an agency responsible for managing the trust funds of some 300,000 Native Americans is as abysmal as ever. In the six and one-half years since he took on this task, the secretary’s only discernable accomplishment has been to get himself charged with contempt of court for not doing anything.

The trial now taking place in Washington, D.C., is the result of a class-action lawsuit brought by five members of Western tribes. They claim that, through decades of shoddy record-keeping, mismanagement and noncompliance with standard accounting practices, Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs essentially has lost track of roughly a half-billion dollars in trust accounts. If the money’s there, BIA doesn’t know exactly whom it belongs to. If the money’s not there, BIA doesn’t know exactly, or even roughly, where it went.

While agreeing the accounts were a jumble long before Mr. Babbitt’s reign, the plaintiffs and the judge are mystified as to why they remain that way, despite all the appearances of enormous activity. It may be that some BIA staffers have decided that there are worse fates than spending the rest of their working lives pointlessly shuffling papers and have no interest in actually finishing. It may be that there have been isolated cases of embezzlement, with the embezzlers, perhaps long retired, deliberately muddling records to avoid detection and thus making the reconstruction even more difficult.

Most likely, though, it appears BIA has simply forgotten that this isn’t their money. It’s not, as is often the case with government money, theoretical money.

It’s real money that belongs to real people. It’s not welfare, handout or entitlement money. It’s money owed to individual Indians for leases and royalties for land, gas, oil, minerals and other resources agreed to by treaty, some going back 150 years. Some accounts have never been audited or reconciled during that entire time. Many accounts are just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Many account holders are desperately poor.

In 1994, Congress, believing its new interior secretary was truly interested, appointed Paul Homan, a former banker and bank regulator, as special trustee within the department to oversee the cleanup. Mr. Homan resigned early this year, saying Mr. Babbitt had consistently blocked his efforts to turn the job BIA was finding impossible over to an independent agency. Babbitt says Homan hurt BIA’s feelings and wasn’t a team player.

So now it’s up to Judge Royce Lamberth to decide whether BIA will retain control over the trust funds or whether, as the plaintiffs ask, they are turned over to a court-appointed manager.

As he concluded his testimony, Secretary Babbitt said he wouldn’t object to some level of court oversight, provided BIA was still in control. Judge Lamberth said he appreciated the secretary’s opinion on the matter. The secretary thanked the judge for saying so. Not only are his jokes getting old, he doesn’t even recognize sarcasm anymore.