How Guardianship Became a Federal Priority

The exploitation of guardianship as a tool of control and theft is not a recent phenomenon—and its history is far darker than most Americans know.

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world, having negotiated mineral rights to oil-rich land. That wealth made them targets. Over the course of several years, dozens of Osage people were murdered in a systematic campaign of killing and fraud that became known as the Reign of Terror. At the center of this scheme was a legal mechanism that should sound familiar to anyone following the modern guardianship reform movement: court-appointed guardianship.

As journalist and author David Grann documents in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017), guardianship was weaponized against the Osage with chilling efficiency. Over the tribe's vehement objections, many Osage adults—including women who had managed their own affairs for years—were declared legally “incompetent” by local courts and assigned white guardians who controlled every aspect of their financial lives, down to routine household purchases. One Osage veteran returned from service in World War I only to find he could not sign his own checks. The guardians, Grann notes, were typically drawn from the ranks of the most prominent white citizens in Osage County—the very people positioned to profit from the arrangement.

This was not guardianship as protection. It was guardianship as predation—a legally sanctioned mechanism for stripping people of autonomy, dignity, and wealth, backed by the authority of the courts.

The murders that grew out of this environment—and the federal investigation that followed—would have consequences that reverberate to this day. The Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the predecessor to the FBI and then housed within the U.S. Department of Justice, took on the case under the ambitious directorship of J. Edgar Hoover. The investigation, while flawed and incomplete in ways Grann carefully documents, did succeed in securing convictions. More significantly for institutional history, it became a launching pad. As Grann writes, Hoover used the Osage case as a showcase for a modernized, professionally trained, scientifically capable federal law enforcement agency—one that could go where local sheriffs and state attorneys either could not or would not. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch captured the sentiment of the moment: local and state authorities had investigated and done nothing; it was only federal intervention that brought any measure of accountability.

The case helped secure expanded funding and authority for the BOI, and in 1935 the agency was formally reorganized and renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Why this history matters for today's guardianship reform movement:

The Osage case is a reminder that guardianship abuse is not an anomaly or a product of bad actors slipping through the cracks of an otherwise sound system. It is a vulnerability that is structurally built into guardianship itself—a legal framework that removes an individual's rights and places them in the hands of another, with oversight that has historically proven inadequate to prevent exploitation. The Osage were not failed by one corrupt guardian or one negligent judge. They were failed by an entire county apparatus —courts, prominent citizens, and local authorities — that had every incentive to look the other way.

A century later, advocates, families, and people subject to guardianship across the United States are raising strikingly similar concerns: limited due process, difficult-to-challenge court orders, financial exploitation, and the effective erasure of the ward's voice. The names and circumstances have changed. The structural problem has not.

Reform efforts at the state and federal level—including calls for stronger oversight, clearer restoration-of-rights pathways, and greater use of less-restrictive alternatives such as supported decision-making—are not simply policy tweaks. They are attempts to address a flaw with deep roots in American legal history.

The FBI's Role Today

The FBI is no stranger to the financial crimes that lie at the heart of guardianship abuse. Through its White Collar Crime Units, the Bureau is positioned to work alongside local prosecutors to investigate the full range of offenses that can accompany predatory guardianship: embezzlement, fraud, conspiracy, theft, money laundering, and—where victims are moved or assets transferred across state lines—human trafficking of vulnerable persons.

That role is not merely institutional tradition. It is codified in federal law. The Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act directly charges the Attorney General, in consultation with the FBI Director, with ensuring that Bureau agents receive regular, comprehensive training in the investigation and prosecution of elder abuse crimes. The Act specifies that this training must include both specialized strategies for communicating with and assisting elder abuse victims, and relevant forensic training—recognizing that these cases require not only legal skill but sensitivity to the particular vulnerabilities of those harmed.

The FBI's investigative authority, combined with the Justice Department's mandate under the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act, means that federal tools already exist to address the most serious cases of guardianship abuse. The question is not whether the law permits action—it is whether the will exists to use it.

For further reading: David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017). The book was adapted into a major film directed by Martin Scorsese in 2023.