As Elon Musk and Donald Trump turn their attention to openly betraying Ukraine, we should remember how those two billionaires have betrayed America’s own oppressed victims of invasion, our American Indian brothers and sisters.
Kevin Abourezk reports in Indian Country Today that the Trump/Musk slashing of federal programs cut $469 million in grants and contracts for tribal communities. Abourezk’s source, a new Brookings Institution analysis, finds that Trump and Musk took $19.6 million away from South Dakota’s tribes out of $29.9 million the federal government had already committed to paying.
Compared to all 50 states, South Dakota lost the tenth-highest raw dollar amount and the fifth-highest share of obligated funds. No adjoining states’ tribal residents were hit harder by Trump’s cuts than South Dakota’s.
These cuts violated our fundamental treaty obligations and any trust the tribes might have placed in our federal government:
Last year, Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said about DOGE: “They need to know, come up to speed real quick, on what treaty rights and trust responsibility means.” Wizipan Garriott, the Interior Department’s former principal deputy assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, told Tribal Business News that the cuts created “a lot of confusion on multiple levels” as to whether trust obligations will be honored. And as Louise Matson, executive director of the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, described it: “You don’t know when or if future payments will keep your programs alive.”
The violations of trust and treaty obligations go beyond funding. For example, DOGE’s actions have also undermined Tribes’ treaty-bound hunting and fishing rights. Among the offices DOGE targeted was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office that provides the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho with technical and scientific support for wildlife management on their reservation land. In an interview with High Country News, Wes Martel, who served on the Eastern Shoshone Business Council and was the chairman of the Tribe’s Fish and Game Committee, said that in light of DOGE’s actions, “Most of the trust relationship we’re talking about doesn’t exist, especially now” [Robert Maxim, Glencora Haskins, Mary Elizabeth Campbell, and Ryan Williams, “DOGE’s Impact in Indian Country: Nearly $470 Million in Lost Funding,” Brookings Institution, 2026.10.16 ].
And those treaty violations weren’t mere collateral damage in Trump’s war on everyone who doesn’t golf with him or inflate his cryptocoin. Trump and Musk very deliberately targeted Indian Country, flagging programs with “tribal” in their descriptions more than any other keyword:
The numbers tell a stark story. Of the 2,999 federal grant programs tracked across dozens of government websites between January 20 and May 30, 2025, nearly a quarter were canceled, representing one of the largest systematic reductions in federal grant funding in recent history.
…Perhaps most revealing is what the canceled programs contained. An analysis of program descriptions uncovered 3,138 instances of 105 different terms that appear to have been flagged for scrutiny. The patterns provide insight into the ideological framework driving the cancellations.
Most Frequently Flagged Terms in Canceled Programs:
- “Tribal”: 381 instances (31% of programs containing the word)
- “Institutional”: 182 instances (14.4% or programs)
- “Diverse”: 173 instances (18% of programs)
- “Diversity”: 173 instances (15% of programs)
- “Women”: 171 instances (10.2% of programs)
- “Underserved”: 167 instances (15% of programs)
- “Equity”: 162 instances (15.1% of programs)
- “Underrepresented”: 123 instances (12.8% of programs)
The presence of terms like “tribal,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “underserved” in canceled programs suggests that initiatives explicitly designed to address historical disparities or serve marginalized communities were systematically targeted. Climate-related terms like “clean energy,” “climate change,” and “environmental justice” also appeared frequently in canceled programs [Zoe Kendall, “The Hidden Scale of Federal Grant Program Cancellations: How $16.7 Billion in Funding Disappeared,” Linkedin, 2025.06.03].
Lakota neighbors, if Chas Jewett and friends or your own civic consciences get you out to vote, remember Trump and Musk’s openly racist assault on your tribal programs, and vote against every Republican who said “O.K. fine” to those hateful (and wasteful, and self-dealing) cuts.
What a shocker.
Republican former South Dakota Governor now-US Senator Mike Rounds is an insurance salesman by trade and has wanted to deconstruct the Indian Health Service and Medicaid for most of his life.
So to nobody’s surprise, Rounds turned on American Indians when in the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration a career criminal commanded the US Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the Dakota Excess pipeline that violated tribal sovereignty, repeatedly cut funds for Indian education, moved to privatize Native trusts, cut foreign aid to countries with high Native populations and praised Brazil’s extreme white wing autocrat who laid waste to Indigenous lands in the Amazon.
Trump hates American Indians so deeply after losing a 1993 casino case under the 1988 Indian Gaming Act he deployed Covid as a biological weapon in 2020 to annihilate as many people as he could and so far he has gotten away with genocide. Contending tribal nations enjoy racial preference lawyers and political appointees in that administration attempted to deny Medicaid benefits to some three million Native Americans even after Republicans cut funding to the Indian Health Service.
Under Trump’s direction US Immigration and Customs Enforcement performed mass hysterectomies on Indigenous women, stripped funding for enforcement of the Violence Against Women Act and stonewalled investigations of missing and murdered Indigenous women or MMIW cases.
South Dakota’s junior Republican US Senator even described the “unimaginable horrors” at the IHS after Republicans created those unimaginable horrors.