The presidential commission investigating the BP Gulf of Mexico spill has concluded that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wasted $220 million building controversial sand berms that captured a "minuscule amount" of oil and proved to be "underwhelmingly effective" and "overwhelmingly expensive."

The 36 miles of berms, constructed over the objections of many scientists and federal agencies, trapped only about 1,000 barrels of oil out of the nearly 5 million barrels that spilled between April and July, the National Oil Spill Commission said in a draft report released today.

Retired Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen, who headed the spill response, reversed himself and approved the berms amid public pressure from Jindal and other Gulf Coast officials and politicians.

Jindal, a Republican, has called the berms a "great success" and "our last line of defense." His office would not comment, directing reporters to Garret Graves, the state official coordinating the berm project. He rejected the commission's conclusions.

"There's not a federal agency or state agency that has any accurate data on how much oil was captured, so to use that as a metric for success is absurd," Graves said in a statement.

BP gave the state $360 million for the berms. The state now plans to spend the remaining $140 million to turn the berms into barrier islands, the Daily Comet reported earlier this week.

Get more details and background from The Hill, Bloomberg, The Washington Post and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune.

Update at 6:13 p.m. ET: Jindal has released a statement about the commission's report:

This report is partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense. The Commission would do a true service to Americans by recommending federal bureaucracies that can be eliminated or expedited in times of major disasters – like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, instead of attacking the politics of Louisiana and Huey Long. The report's assertion that the berms did not pass the commission's "cost benefit analysis" is insulting to the thousands of people whose way of life depends on the health of our working coast. What exactly is the cost of thousands of jobs and generations of fishermen and oyster harvesters who have made their living off of our coast for over 100 years? I would like the Administration to provide us with an estimate of the 'cost' that they did not deem worthy of every action possible to protect coastal families. We are thrilled that this has become the state's largest barrier island restoration project in history.

(Posted by Michael Winter)