Bureau of Indian Affairs BIA

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun created an Office of Indian Affairs inside the War Department on March 11, 1824, and it moved to the new Interior Department in 1849. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it carried out removal, the reservation system, allotment of tribal lands, and boarding schools that separated Native children from their families and languages. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ended allotment, and the bureau took its current name in 1947.

Today the bureau works with the 574 federally recognized tribes and manages about 56 million acres of land held in trust for tribes and individual Indians. It provides or funds law enforcement, courts, roads, social services, and natural resource management on reservations, increasingly through contracts and compacts under which tribes run the programs themselves, a shift that began with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. Schools are run by the separate Bureau of Indian Education, and health care by the Indian Health Service in HHS.

The bureau's record of mismanaging trust funds led to the Cobell lawsuit, settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion. In 2022 and 2024 Interior released reports documenting deaths and abuse at federal Indian boarding schools, and President Biden formally apologized in October 2024. In 2025 the bureau faced staff reductions and proposed budget cuts, which supporters described as efficiency measures and tribal leaders warned could breach federal trust obligations.