Where Obama shares blame for failing to prevent Gulf oil spill

G_j

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Sat May-01-10 11:02 AM
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Where Obama shares blame for failing to prevent Gulf oil spill

Edited on Sat May-01-10 11:09 AM by G_j

http://trueslant.com/level/2010/04/30/obama-shares-blame-for-failing-to-prevent-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill/

Obama shares blame for failing to prevent Gulf of Mexico oil spill

Michael Roston

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The White House announced today that there would be a freeze on new offshore drilling until investigators figured out what happened to the TransOcean/BP rig that�s causing all the trouble. This is a pretty empty gesture when you consider that a lot of the major new drilling plans weren�t set to come on line for years. And while parsing the political ramifications and who gets the blame, it�s worth looking at what the Obama administration�s policy has been on safety regulations concerning offshore oil drilling. An examination of some budget documents released earlier this year suggests that the Team Obama�s head has been in the wrong place where safety in offshore oil drilling is concerned give its importance to his energy policy.

The agency charged with enforcing safety regulations on offshore oil rigs is the Minerals Management Service, nestled within the Department of Interior. The MMS, you might recall, was implicated in a doozy of a scandal toward the end of the Bush administration. The part of the agency that was supposed to be ensuring the federal government collected royalties owed to the American people by companies drilling on federal lands had been completely bought off by the very corporations they were regulating. Justin Rood, then at Talking Points Memo, memorably named the scandal �sex-for-oil� because of findings of �improper social ties� between MMS staff and oil and gas industry executives (oh yeah, they also called it �Lubrigate�). And that was just the salacious part of the scandal � the financial loss to the American public as a consequence of the cozy relationship between MMS regulators and the companies they were collecting from remains difficult to calculate.

Since the Obama administration has come into office, it has taken a path with MMS that would not suggest that safety was its primary concerns where offshore drilling was concerned.

For instance, the budget for safety remained relatively flat, growing by about $3 million from FY2009 to FY2010, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration, and then seeing an the budget rise about $119,000 more for this coming year.

At the same time, MMS established some new principles for safety inspection concerned more with risk assessment than covering every facility. The most recent budget request from the Department of Interior states outright that �MMS focuses compliance efforts on those operators whose performance does not meet certain targets.� What this means is that they are focused on the facilities with the greatest risk. And to that end, MMS explained in its budget request that while it completed around 27,000 inspections in FY2009 (the last year of the Bush administration), it anticipated completing fewer inspections in both �10 and �11 � 22,000 and 23,000 respectively. And for that reason, it�s possible that TransOcean�s Deepwater Horizon may not have been on its radar screen.

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