What I think

by an Osage citizen

The record is documents, quotations and dates. What follows is my opinion of them, which you are free to weigh differently. Written August 15, 2026.

Where the record leaves us

The history does not support describing the budgetary outlay in only one way.

In 2019, Osage law said outlays “shall state the amount of tribal funding each branch of government should budget for the respective fiscal year.” Congress described the figures as amounts the branches should not exceed when preparing their budgets. In September 2023, Congress reduced budget requests to get “back below the actual outlay.” Using an outlay to restrict a proposed budget therefore has precedent.

Other parts of the record show that the outlay has not always operated as an absolute ceiling. Congress appropriated more than the Executive Branch outlay in FY2025. It appropriated more than $75 million in FY2026 after stating the outlay as zero. In September 2024, the Appropriations Committee put it plainly: “Right now they’re over their outlay by $2.1 million, but we are not over projected revenue.” In September 2025, members described the outlay as “simply a budgetary tool” and heard that “the outlay any time after budgets are submitted is irrelevant throughout the year.” No member spoke against that reading, and the resolution stating every branch’s outlay at zero passed the same day it was introduced.

The FY2027 outlay was established before the departmental budgets were due. The Executive Branch therefore had a $60 million figure against which to prepare and evaluate its requests. The nearly $98 million in requests exceeded that figure by approximately $38 million. Treating the outlay as a constraint on those requests was consistent with at least part of the Nation’s earlier practice.

That does not explain everything that followed.

The Chief's place in this history

The FY2027 outlay was enacted before Joseph Tillman became Principal Chief. The enacted acts and roll calls reviewed here place him inside the process that produced it.

Tillman served in Congress throughout the development described on the record. He co-sponsored ONCA 19-40, which created the Revenue Advisory Commission. As Speaker, he served on that Commission while it gathered and approved revenue estimates. He later voted for ONCA 20-40, which abolished the Commission and removed the statutory language explaining that outlays stated what each branch should budget, and the enacted act carries his signature as Speaker. He remained in Congress as later Congresses used, exceeded and debated the meaning of their outlays.

On April 27, 2026, then-Congressman Tillman also voted for ONCR 26-12 and its $60 million Executive Branch outlay. He took office as Principal Chief on July 11 and inherited as an executive the same figure he had voted to adopt as a legislator.

The enacted acts, roll calls and recordings reviewed here do not establish what Tillman personally understood at each stage or what motivated his later decisions. They do establish his direct involvement in the creation, operation, alteration and later use of the outlay system. Lack of exposure to that history does not explain the 2026 sequence.

His place in the Nation’s mechanisms is not limited to the outlay. As a Congressman, Tillman was vice chair of the Membership Committee that circulated the 2025 Special Counsel authorization against Attorney General Clint Patterson, was one of its signers, and in March 2026 moved for Patterson’s removal. On September 2, 2026 he became the subject of a Special Counsel authorization brought under the same Rule 12.1 he had helped invoke. The filings and the contemporary reporting establish his part in both roles; they do not establish what he understood or intended in either.

From a budget constraint to an emergency

The remaining question concerns what the Executive Branch did with the outlay.

On August 4, the Chief declared a State of Emergency based on “shortfalls with projected revenue and constraints in the budgetary outlay.” The next day, the Executive Branch announced the closure of Daposka Ahnkodapi, the Osage Nation Visitors Center and Harvest Land, crediting those decisions with approximately $5 million in FY2027 relief.

The timing complicates that basis. In September 2025, members called the outlay irrelevant once budgets were submitted; in August 2026, an outlay for a fiscal year not yet begun stood among the stated grounds for closing programs whose current-year funding was already enacted. In August the Nation was still in FY2026, and the three programs were funded by appropriations Congress had already enacted for that year. The $60 million was the outlay for FY2027, the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2026, and one Congress can revise at any time, as the Chief’s own August 14 request to raise it to $82 million shows. A future year’s constraint, freely adjustable, was treated as the reason to close programs already paid for through the current fiscal year. The arithmetic complicates that basis as well. That credited relief was approximately $5 million in FY2027, against a difference of approximately $38 million between the departmental requests and the outlay. Even taken at full value, the credited relief covered roughly an eighth of that difference, leaving approximately $33 million of it unaddressed by the announced closures.

On August 13, the Chief announced plans to expand language and cultural programming to more than 600 public-school students, increase direct food assistance, continue food production for the Wahzhazhe Early Learning Academies, strengthen the Butcher House and ask Congress to dedicate half of retained revenue to the Permanent Fund.

Those proposals may be part of a broader restructuring. The August 13 statement, read in full, did not identify the resources being redirected from Daposka, the expected cost or funding source of the new programming, or how much of the school’s appropriation would remain as savings. It did not explain how new or expanded commitments would operate during the financial emergency that had required immediate reductions. Continued food production and expansion of the Butcher House also leave unanswered why closing Harvest Land was necessary to the same strategy.

On August 14, the Chief lifted the State of Emergency and formally asked Congress to raise the Executive Branch outlay from $60 million to $82 million. The announced closures remained.

That sequence increased the consequences of Congress’s decision. By the time Congress was formally asked to amend the outlay, the school and the Visitors Center had closed, and Harvest Land had been scheduled to close. The documents reviewed here do not establish that these programs were selected to create bargaining leverage. They do show that their continued closure placed language education, cultural access and food sovereignty inside the dispute over whether Congress would raise the outlay.

Nation-building is not a cash return

The programs selected also intersect with priorities the Nation had recently asked Osage people to identify.

The 2026-2030 Osage Nation Strategic Plan was developed through eighteen listening sessions and 1,275 completed surveys, a 6.8 percent response rate among the 18,809 eligible members the plan counts. Health, Cultural Preservation and Sovereignty emerged as its top three focus areas, followed by Education.

The plan describes language immersion as strengthening Osage identity and the transfer of knowledge between generations. It identifies Harvest Land and the Butcher House as developments that enhance food sovereignty, and it lists the expanded Pawhuska Visitors Center among the Nation’s recent accomplishments. Its broader vision calls for a flourishing culture, a revitalized language and an Osage Nation able to control its own future. The underlying program record is documented separately from this opinion.

The survey was not a formal vote on whether Daposka, Harvest Land or the Pawhuska Visitors Center must continue in their existing forms. Expanding Daposka was one of several education proposals and did not receive the highest response in that category. Food sovereignty was one of several sovereignty objectives. The plan lists the Visitors Center as an accomplishment, not as a survey question or a directive that it remain open.

The narrower conclusion is still important. The closures affected institutions working within cultural preservation, sovereignty, education, food security and connection to Osage history. These were not values assigned to them after the controversy began. They were already part of the direction Osage citizens had given their government through the Nation’s own planning process.

Government may reconsider how any program operates. Read in full, the plan does not prevent restructuring, require a particular appropriation or prove that every existing program is effective. It does make the basis for these choices a matter of public concern. When reductions fall on institutions connected to some of the Nation’s highest stated priorities, the public record should show why those institutions were selected, what alternatives were considered and what will replace the services that are lost.

Tillman’s August 24 interview makes the accounting mistake plain. He compared what he called Harvest Land’s $1.2 million appropriation with $65,000 returned annually. But the $65,000 measures cash received. It does not measure food distributed to elders, children, cultural events and health-study participants; youth work and agricultural education; or the Food Assistance Program. It also does not establish the savings from closure when the Nation will retain the land, equipment and a smaller operation. The figures and services are documented on the program record.

The Osage Nation owns businesses, but it is not one. The Nation’s role is to build sovereignty for its people through many means. Business is one avenue. It can create wealth, employment and financial independence. But sovereignty also means keeping the language alive, building knowledge, feeding people, strengthening culture, supporting artists and giving Osage citizens the means to shape their own lives and communities.

The effects of that work do not stop with the person a program serves. A child carries language home. An artist reaches a buyer. A family with access to food becomes less dependent on an outside system. Capacity built in one Osage person strengthens the people around them. A Nation therefore has to account across generations as well as fiscal years. The question is not only what a program returned this year, but what it made possible and what survives after the appropriation is spent. The work is to leave language, knowledge, institutions and practical independence strong enough to carry Osage people into the twenty-second century.

Treating the Nation as a business strips that work of its purpose. It takes the heart of a people and reduces it to a line item on a spreadsheet. Language becomes a cost per student. Food sovereignty becomes an appropriation minus sales. Cultural access becomes coffee receipts. The bottom line becomes the only line that counts.

Even that bottom line was growing within the audited governmental entity. The FY2025 independent audit reported that Governmental Programs Department net position increased by $21.7 million during the year, to $407.2 million. Net position is not cash available for appropriation, and the Department does not include every Nation entity. But within the scope of the audit the administration invoked in explaining its finances, the bottom line was positive and increasing.

The same error reaches all three closures. A language-immersion school does not prove its worth by returning its appropriation to the Treasury. The Pawhuska Visitors Center, created to promote Osage culture, artists and businesses, cannot be measured by coffee sales alone. Harvest Land was built to increase food sovereignty, not merely to operate as a produce company. These institutions may generate revenue, and the government should account for that revenue honestly. Profit can help finance nation-building. It is not the measure of whether nation-building occurred.

The description of Daposka as a whim carries the same reduction. At the August 10 hearing, Geneva HorseChief Hamilton testified that Tillman had described the school to her as having been done on a whim and as a project of former Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear. Her testimony and the limits of that attribution are documented on the program record. If an institution built through years of work can be recast as one officeholder’s whim, nation-building never gets to outlive the administration that began it.

The Nation may need more financial accountability. Accountability has a method. The FY2025 statements were audited by independent firm REDW under generally accepted auditing standards and Government Auditing Standards. A financial audit examines records, controls and compliance. A program review measures results against the purpose for which the program was created. Both require a defined scope, evidence, findings and an opportunity to respond. The “wow” Tillman described on seeing two top-line figures is not a substitute for either, nor is a rapid closure that never shows its program-by-program savings.

That is not an argument against accounting. It is an argument for honest accounting. Did the program deliver what the Nation created it to deliver? Were those results worth the cost? Could the work be done better? What will replace it after closure? Comparing an appropriation with cash receipts answers none of those questions. It mistakes the absence of profit for the absence of value.

Why language and food are not ordinary cuts

Two of the three closures fell on the two things assimilation policy was built to take: a people’s language and its food.

For generations, federal Indian policy worked to end Native languages, removing children into boarding schools where speaking them was punished, and to break Native self-sufficiency by controlling the food supply, replacing subsistence and the buffalo economy with rationed dependence. The Osage lived both. That an Osage immersion school and an Osage food-sovereignty farm were the first institutions closed does not, in the materials reviewed here, establish why they were chosen. It does mean the closures fell where the Nation’s recovery from that history is youngest and least secure: on the children being raised back into the language, and on the ground meant to feed the people without asking anyone’s permission.

This is a claim about effect, not intent, which the record cannot reach. Whatever the reason, closing the language school and the food farm first reproduces the two central mechanisms of the assimilation era, and it does so at the hands of the Nation’s own government. That is why these closures read to many Osage as more than an accounting decision, and why the reasons for them, which the public materials reviewed here still do not give, weigh more here than they would for an ordinary line item.

What remains unanswered

The documents reviewed here still do not answer several questions:

What projected-revenue shortfall existed apart from the difference between departmental requests and the outlay?

Why did that difference require a State of Emergency rather than revision of departmental requests and action through the ordinary appropriations process?

What authority permitted the Executive Branch to close or suspend programs for which Congress had already enacted FY2026 appropriations?

Why were Daposka Ahnkodapi, the Osage Nation Visitors Center and Harvest Land selected instead of other programs or reductions?

What savings will each closure produce after employee obligations, property, existing appropriations and replacement programming are accounted for?

What resources will be redirected from Daposka, and what will the proposed language programming cost?

How will the Nation expand food assistance and strengthen food sovereignty while closing Harvest Land?

Why were the closures announced before the Chief formally asked Congress to amend the outlay?

Why did the closures remain after the State of Emergency was lifted?

What will happen if Congress raises the outlay to $82 million?

The documents reviewed here do not supply the financial calculation, legal analysis or program-by-program reasoning necessary to answer these questions.

What the record does establish is narrower. The outlay had previously been used to constrain budgets, although Congress had also appropriated above it. Tillman participated in that history as a legislator and voted for the FY2027 figure. As Chief, he relied on that figure in declaring an emergency and closing programs tied to priorities the Nation’s own planning process had identified as important. He later asked Congress to raise the outlay, lifted the emergency and left the closures in place.

That is where the public record presently ends. The explanations may exist within the government, but they do not yet appear in the public materials reviewed here. As additional documents become available, this account should change with them.

What can be done

The record leaves the Nation with options. It sets out several, and in my opinion the choice among them is now the live question. The count recurs: three programs closed, three impoundment drafts unenacted, three avenues still open for testing the closures.

The authority question has a forum. Under 3 ONC § 5-108 the Supreme Court holds original jurisdiction over a declaratory judgment between the Legislative and Executive Branches on the meaning of the Constitution, and under 3 ONC § 1-108 the courts review the executive actions of Nation officials. Either branch can ask the Court the question the record leaves open: whether the Executive may suspend a program Congress has already funded. As of this writing, no such action between the branches appears in the public materials this record reviews.

Congress holds powers of its own. It set the outlay by resolution and can raise, condition or decline to raise it; it holds the appropriation power under Article VI, Section 24; and the programs that closed were ones it had already funded. Its members have questioned the basis for the emergency in public session. Questioning is not the same as the exercise of those powers, and the difference has shown in the outcome: the closures remained.

The Nation also wrote the remedy for this situation and set it aside. A budget-impoundment process was drafted three times, in 2020 and twice in 2023, and none of the three became law. Had any of the three passed, a Chief seeking to withhold appropriated funds would have had to send Congress a special message stating the amount, the department and the reasons, and the funds would have stayed spendable until Congress had acted. That is the mechanism as the record presents it across the three drafts. The bills were drafted separately, and their full texts are linked on this page, where the three can be compared directly. The gap the drafted process was meant to close was identified inside Congress in 2020 and left open. Congress can take the drafted process back up.

None of this decides the underlying dispute, and none of it is mine to direct. What the record shows is that the avenues exist: a court that can rule, a Congress that can act, and a law already written that could keep this from recurring. Which of them is used, and whether the closed doors reopen, is a choice the Nation has not yet made.

This page is part of a record compiled by an Osage citizen, independent of the Osage Nation government. Every figure, date and quotation on it can be checked against the document it came from.