The curse of Bush

By Kate Sheppard

The Obama administration has faced harsh criticism for its oversight of offshore oil and gas development in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The most absurd commentary, of course, comes from Republicans who have consistently pushed back against any attempts to regulate industry for years. The administration has been fighting back, but no one wants to actually call the problem by its name: the Bush administration.

At a House hearing Wednesday, Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) accused Salazar of "harping on what MMS did or didn't do in the previous administration. "Why aren't we talking about the here and now?" asked Lamborn.

Salazar shot back about the efforts they've taken to reform the beleaguered agency. "Unlike the prior administration, this is not the candy store for the oil and gas kingdom that you and others were a part of," he deadpanned. At another point in the hearing, he pointed out, again without naming names, that an official at the department was sent to federal prison for obstruction of justice under the previous administration. (That would be Steven Griles, a deputy secretary at the department from 2001 to 2004).

On Thursday, when MMS head Elizabeth Birnbaum was pushed out of her post as head of the Minerals Management Service, her statement pointed back to the Bush administration, again without naming it directly, for leaving the MMS a deeply dysfunctional institution when she took over last July. She said that she hopes the reforms that Salazar has proposed for the agency "will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited."

It happened again Thursday when Obama made reference the past decade of cozy relations between industry and regulators. Eight of those years, of course, were under Bush. That was also when the porn, meth, and oil parties were happening in Lake Charles, La., office and the sex, coke, and oil parties were happening in the Lakewood, Colo., office. In fact, if you look at all the failures at MMS that may have contributed to this disaster, the vast majority happened under Bush.

It's not that the Obama administration MMS has been blameless. There was, of course, the lack of environmental analysis on the gulf well and the pitiful review of BP's oil spill response "plan." There was also a less-than-flattering piece on Birnbaum in the New York Times this week. It didn't paint her as an active problem at the agency, however, but rather gave the impression that she wasn't up to the task of reforming such a screwed up division. From what folks who know her have told me, she was well intentioned, if significantly unprepared for the job.

So Republican badgering of the administration over the issue is fairly absurd. Fixing the troubled agency was one of the very first things Salazar sought to address after taking office, announcing a restructuring of MMS's royalty-in-kind program, calling for a Justice Department investigation, and instating a new conduct code for the agency in the first days after taking office.

The Obama Department of Interior could have done more, of course, to improve the beleaguered agency. But the root of this is still the one name they won't say: George W. Bush.

Kate Sheppard covers energy and environmental politics in Mother Jones's Washington bureau. For more of her stories, see here, and you can follow her on Twitter here.