House GOP threatens subpoena over offshore drilling ban report
By Ben Geman - 01/25/12 05:10 PM
House Republicans are threatening to subpoena the Interior Department for documents related to a 2010 report that incorrectly implied that outside experts had endorsed a temporary ban on deepwater drilling in the wake of the BP spill.
Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), in a letter Wednesday, said Interior has failed to fully comply with requests for information about the late May 2010 drilling safety report that called for the moratorium.
Interior imposed the drilling freeze shortly after the report was issued, and lifted the ban in the fall of 2010.
The GOP letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “provides notice of our intent to move to compel cooperation and production of documents” if they’re not provided in February.
Republicans, who called the deepwater moratorium an overreaction, have championed the cause of outside engineers that Interior consulted for the study, who say the 2010 report wrongly suggested they backed the drilling ban.
E2 wrote much more about the fracas here.
The Interior Department’s inspector general, in November 2010 findings, said White House edits to the drilling safety report led to the faulty impression. From the IG’s November 2010 findings:
The version that the White House returned to [Interior] had revised and re-ordered the language in the Executive Summary, placing the peer review language immediately following the moratorium recommendation. This caused the distinction between the Secretary’s moratorium recommendation — which had not been peer reviewed — and the safety recommendations contained in the 30-Day Report — which had been peer reviewed — to become effectively lost.
But the IG report also found that Interior officials were not intentionally trying to suggest the outside experts backed the drilling freeze.
The new letter to Interior from Hastings and Energy and Minerals subcommittee Chairman Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) is available here.
“Americans, especially those in the Gulf, deserve answers as to how these policy decisions were made, who made them and if they were actually based on sound science,” Hastings said in a statement Wednesday.