We've seen plenty of examples of the Bush administration's love for rewarding disaster. Screw up a little? Promotion. Screw up a lot? Medal of Freedom time! What does BushCo do about success? That's been harder to characterize, because there have been so few successes in this administration that the policy went untested.

But we do have the example of Bob Maxwell. When Bush came into office, it was Mr. Maxwell's job with the Department of the Interior to conduct audits on oil firms and make sure they were paying royalties for the oil they extracted on public lands. It was a job he did well.

During a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Department’s best auditors in the nation’s oil patch, snaring promotions that eventually had him supervising a staff of 120 people.

With Mr. Maxwell at the helm, the Interior Department recovered hundreds of millions of dollars that were owed to the American people, but which the oil companies tried to avoid paying.



But midway through the first Bush term, the administration did a slight reorganization of the Interior Department. One that essentially ended oversight of the oil companies and kicked Mr. Maxwell to the curb.

That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments. "When I got this citation, they told me this would be very good for my career," said Mr. Maxwell, smiling during an interview here. "Next thing I knew, they fired me." Today, at 53, Mr. Maxwell lives on a $44,000 annual pension in a two-bedroom bungalow in the hills outside the Hawaiian capital.

Just so it's clear: Maxwell had already recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for taxpayers. He had just uncovered indications that a major oil company was cheating, costing taxpayers millions more. His reward was to be "reorganized" out of a job. In Bush World success cannot be tolerated – especially success which takes money from his pals in the oil patch.

Fortunately for all of us, Maxwell is not being quiet in his forced retirement.

Invoking a law that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Mr. Maxwell has filed a suit in federal court in Denver against the Kerr-McGee Corporation. The suit accuses the company, which was recently acquired by Anadarko Petroleum, of bilking the government out of royalty payments. It also contends that the Interior Department ignored audits indicating that Kerr-McGee was cheating. Three other federal auditors, who once worked for Mr. Maxwell and still work at the Interior Department, have since filed similar suits of their own against other energy companies.

Every major oil company – from Exxon Mobil on down – has tried to get in Mr. Maxwell's way, but he's won every court battle. Should he win the final judgment, Kerr-McGee will have to pony up another $50 Million.

We don't often think of accountants as heroes, but Bob Maxwell certainly lives up to that title. He's waged a David vs. Goliath struggle against Big Oil in the name of the American public, and continues to fight even after he was thrown from his position. It's unlikely the Bush administration is going to award him a medal, but he certainly deserves public accolade.

The struggle Maxwell's waging is only a small part of the Bush administration's overall mismanagement of public resources.

In February, the Interior Department admitted that energy companies might escape more than $7 billion in royalty payments over the next five years because of errors in leases signed in the 1990s that officials are now scrambling to renegotiate. The errors were discovered in 2000, but were ignored for the next six years and have yet to be fixed.

Get that? The Bush administration came into office knowing that there were problems in the system that would cost the public $7 billion over five years, and they didn't do a thing to stop it. They could have, but they didn't. In fact, they removed the barriers that were keeping the companies from cheating even more.

Another $7 billion dollars given away to the oil companies. Sounds like somebody's in line for a medal!