Cite as: 532 U. S. 1 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
controlling for purposes of evaluating the authority of the United States to represent different interests"). The position of the Tribe as beneficiary is thus a far cry from the position of the paid consultant.
Quite apart from its attempt to draw a direct analogy between tribes and conventional consultants, the Department argues that compelled release of the documents would itself impair the Department's performance of a specific fiduciary obligation to protect the confidentiality of communications with tribes.5 Because, the Department argues, traditional fiduciary standards forbid a trustee to disclose information acquired as a trustee when it should know that disclosure would be against the beneficiary's interests, excluding the Tribes' submissions to the Department from Exemption 5 would handicap the Department in doing what the law requires. Brief for Petitioners 36-37.6 And in much the same vein, the Department presses the argument that "FOIA is intended to cast light on existing government practices; it should not be interpreted and applied so as to compel federal agencies to perform their assigned substantive functions in other than the normal manner." Id., at 29.
All of this boils down to requesting that we read an "Indian trust" exemption into the statute, a reading that is out
5 The Department points out that the Plan-related documents submitted by the Tribes were furnished to the Bureau rather than to Reclamation, a fact which the Department claims reinforces the conclusion that the documents were provided to the Department in its capacity as trustee. Brief for Petitioners 47. This fact does not alter our analysis, however, because we think that even communications made in support of the trust relationship fail to fit comfortably within the statutory text.
6 We note that the Department cites the Restatement for the proposition that a " 'trustee is under a duty to the beneficiary not to disclose to a third person information which he has acquired as trustee where he should know that the effect of such disclosure would be detrimental to the interest of the beneficiary.' " Brief for Petitioners 36 (quoting Restatement (Second) of Trusts § 170, Comment s (1957)). It is unnecessary for us to decide if the Department's duties with respect to its communications with Indian tribes fit this pattern.
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