🏦 THE BANK · FOLLOW THE MONEY

Follow the money

≈ 4 min read · or listen, or skim the bold lines

D · Draft — not verified   Every document named below was located and opened. Where we could not find something, the page says we could not find it — which is different from saying it does not exist. How we verify →

If the Nation cannot publish its own laws, and the fix is “a budget line,” then the next question answers itself: where does the money come from, where does it go, and can anyone watch? We went looking. The answer is not the one this site expected.

The budget is substantially public. It is also nearly unreadable.

FINDING

These documents exist, free, right now:

The Budget Instructions Manual — the rulebook for how every dollar is budgeted — is posted each year by the Office of Management and Budget. It defines the chart of accounts, the object codes, the calendar, and the rules programs must follow. This is the same BIM that Council Delegate Vince James raises in his interview: leaders sign it, he says, and then work around it. His critique is not that it is secret. It is that it is signed and avoided — a sharper charge, and a checkable one, because the document is right there.

Appropriations are legislation, and legislation posts for public comment on DiBB before passage — with its exhibits attached. A supplemental appropriation request will carry the program’s budget forms, the Controller’s memorandum, and the Office of Management and Budget’s budget-impact analysis, because 12 N.N.C. § 820 requires them. A member of the public can read what a program said it needed, and what the Controller said about whether the money was there.

The Budget and Finance Committee meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month, and those meetings are where the money is actually decided. Its advisors include the Controller, OMB, the Auditor General, Legislative Counsel, and the Department of Justice. It also serves as the Nation’s audit committee — receiving annual audits and monitoring the financial performance of the enterprises.

How a dollar gets decided

The Budget and Finance Committee starts it: approving the revenue projection, setting each branch’s base planning allocation, approving the calendar and the Budget Instructions Manual. Programs then write their budgets and send them to OMB. Those budgets are reviewed by the branch chiefs, then the oversight committees, then Budget and Finance, then Naabik’íyáti’, and finally the full Council. The President may then veto items. Money above the plan — supplemental appropriations from the Undesignated Fund Balance — runs through § 820, requires the Controller’s review, and can be waived only by a two-thirds vote of the full Council.

Read that again and notice what it means: there are at least six public rooms where a citizen could speak before a dollar moves. The window into the budget is not missing. It is unused. Budget & Appropriations 101 teaches the machinery.

What we could not find

FINDING

We could not locate, on any Navajo Nation website: a plain summary of where the Nation’s revenue comes from — federal funds, resource royalties, taxes, enterprise dividends, trust income — expressed in a form a voter could read in five minutes. We could not locate audited financial statements posted for public download, nor a citizen’s version of the comprehensive budget. And as the economy article reports, we could not locate audited financials or business plans for the Nation’s own enterprises — whose sole shareholder is the Navajo people.

So the budget divides into three, and only the first is genuinely open. The rules are public. The decisions are public, if you can attend a Tuesday meeting or read a resolution’s exhibits. The result — what was actually spent, against what was promised — is the part a voter cannot easily see.

Which changes the demand

“Publish the budget” is the wrong ask; much of it is published. The right asks are narrower and harder to refuse: one page showing where the money comes from. One page showing what was spent against what was appropriated. The audits, posted. The enterprise financials, or a reasoned explanation of why not. That is fix #6, stated precisely — and it is why the distinction between “not published” and “hard to find” is the most useful idea on this site.

And it returns the “sitting there” problem to its proper place. Candidates describe chapter allocations and capital-improvement funds appropriated and unspent, year after year. The Nation’s problem may be an unspent budget more than a starved one — and a spending report, published, would settle that question in an afternoon.

Open items across the whole site, sorted by who owns them: The Work →