Bureaucracy is the Pimp
It would be so easy to use the fact that despite the President’s moratorium on new offshore drilling, new drilling projects are being greenlit as another example of the Obama administration standing for so very, very little–and let me be clear and consistent about this: inasmuch as I disagreed with just about everything they did and think some of it rose to the level of criminality, the Bush administration had a consistent set of principles to which they were single-mindedly devoted, whereas Obama takes a bit from Clinton column A (health care reform), and bit from Bush column B (asserting broad executive power, keeping Guantanamo open, and staying the course in Afghanistan) and great heaping gobs from appease Wall Street column C. In that sense, the idea that the President might say “no more drilling ’til we get the risks under control” and then do precisely the opposite should stand as yet another example that he/they don’t really give a damn.
And yet, I sense that in this case what we’re seeing here is just the nature of a massive bureaucratic machine that keeps grinding on for awhile after the guy in the control room hits the brakes:
In testifying before Congress on May 18, [Interior Secretary Ken] Salazar and officials from his agency said they recognized the problems with the waivers and they intended to try to rein them in. But Mr. Salazar also said that he was limited by a statutory requirement that he said obligated his agency to process drilling requests within 30 days after they have been submitted.
“That is what has driven a number of the categorical exclusions that have been given over time in the gulf,” he said.
[snip]
The moratorium has created inconsistencies and confusion.
While Interior Department officials have said certain new drilling procedures on existing wells can proceed, Mr. Salazar, when pressed to explain why new drilling was being allowed, testified on May 18 that “there is no deep-water well in the O.C.S. that has been spudded — that means started — after April 20,” referring to the gulf’s outer continental shelf.
However, Newfield Exploration Company has confirmed that it began drilling a deep-water well in 2,095 feet of water after April 20.
Mr. Obama can’t be expected to manage the day-to-day operations of the Interior Department, and it appears that Mr. Salazar can’t either. Until such point as someone steps in and instructs the various drones and naked mole rats in their cubicle Habitrails that it ain’t business as usual anymore, they’ll just roll on with their rubber stamps for industry–which is exactly how we Americans are supposed to like it anyway. Historically, we’ve seen that sometimes when a president decrees that the government will do one thing or another that sometimes the people who do the actual work listen and obey, and other times it takes some repetition before the message sinks in.
Or hell, what do I know–maybe the administration just doesn’t give a damn after all.
May 24th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Steven says, “Mr. Obama can’t be expected to manage the day-to-day operations of the Interior Department.” I agree. One could make a similar statement about Mr. Bush not being expected to manage the day-to-day operations of FEMA after Katrina. However. there’s a striking difference in how the media allocated Presidential blame after these two disasters.
May 24th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Hehe… Could have seen that one coming.
The difference is that there’s not much the President can actually do about a well broken on the sea floor. The Bush administration could have done many things after Katrina, but their ideological views lead them to neuter those best able to respond (prior to the hurricane)… FEMA was a well run agency under Clinton and Bush 41…
I do agree with Steve’s characterization of the Obama administration- which anyone who read his book could have told you- as not being very ideologically driven. He’s very clearly driven by practicality and an understanding of what is politically possible.
I have mixed feelings about it, I guess…
May 24th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
David-
I couldn’t disagree more.
Americans were dying in New Orleans. A concerned President, a real, authentic, moral man, steps up to every microphone in sight and says, again and again, “It nauseates me that we can’t get water to the Superdome. I’m going to make sure the water gets there, even if I have to drive it there myself. Then I’m going to find the people responsible for the delay, and fire them.”
It seems that Salazar is caught between two imperatives-obey the law that says he has to approve the leases, and obey the imperatives to stop all new drilling. There is bureaucratic inertia at play as well, and it sounds like firing would be called for. Like you, I don’t see that happening, either.
But Katrina was different. It was forseeable, and the warnings were ignored. (There were specials on the Discovery Channel before the storm warning that this was going to happen, for heaven’s sake.) And while it was going on, America knew what was happening-and Bush didn’t. It wasn’t being handled, and everyone could see that. Either he didn’t care, or he didn’t make it clear to everyone that he cared. I’m not sure which it is.
May 24th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Cokie Roberts is a lifelong Democrat. Yesterday, On ABC’s “This Week, she said Obama wasn’t doing enough about the spill.
“The oil is gushing and we’re being lied to by how much oil is gushing … and the administration has now named a commission,” Roberts said. “Now this is what you do when you really don’t have anything else to do: You name a commission,” she said. “That’s not going to stop the oil.”
link http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2010/05/sarah-palin-cokie-roberts-donna-brazile-fault-obama-administrations-response-to-oil-spill.html
May 24th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert also accuses the Obama Administration of doing less than they should:
The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.
[snip]
This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans…
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html
Sarah Palin is also accusing Obama of being in bed with Big Oil. It’s surprising to see Palin and Herbert agreed on an issue.
May 25th, 2010 at 8:04 am
Hantu,
You are engaging in a red herring. It is not about fixing the well on the ocean floor. It is about containing the spill.
The Administration’s response has essentially been, “Let BP handle it.” Not much different than Bush’s Katrina fiasco with the same bureaucratic nightmares (Army Corps of Engineers sitting on sand boom plans). Jindal has only received 20% of the aid requested.
“Governor Jindal said, “On May 2nd we leaned forward and requested the resources that our parishes would need under a worst-case scenario response to this oil spill. In fact, the very next day, we announced all of our coastal parish detailed protection plans and detailed that we had formally requested three million feet of absorbent boom, five million feet of hard boom and 30 ‘jack up’ barges.
“Today is May 24th and we have received a total of 815,569 feet of hard boom to date. Not even a million feet. 680,249 feet of this total has been deployed and 135,320 feet of hard boom sits and waits to be deployed. In the last 24 hours, we have received only 5,040 feet of hard boom. We need more boom, we need more resources, we need the materials we have requested to fight this oil and keep it out of our marsh and off of our coast.” http://www.thegovmonitor.com/world_news/united_states/governor-jindal-meets-with-federal-officials-calls-response-efforts-disjointed-31719.html
This is more than three weeks since Jindal made the request and 5 weeks since the incident.
With foresight and quick response times like this, I cannot wait until the government gets hold of our healthcare…
May 25th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Not quite the tune Jindal was singing when he was complaining about the government spending money on volcano monitoring equipment.
The fact is that the government does not have the capability to address this. Not to say that they shouldn’t or couldn’t, but they don’t. I’ve heard a host of engineers in the news saying that there are very limited things that can be done, and most things are highly experimental. This is not to say that the government reacted well, and if in fact there were unnecessary delays, those in charge should be penalized…
May 25th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
A terrible analogy. Volcano monitoring equipment is different than a service the constitution is clear about the federal government providing.
It’s the typical progressive strawman argument. A conservative says “limited government” and progressives swear he or she said “no government.” I’ll give you a hint. True conservatives want the federal government to provide the services outlined in the constitution (roads, protection from invasion, etc.).
And the entire of your final paragraph could have easily explained the response to Katrina. The only differences are that Katrina was a much larger scale disaster (making it more difficult to handle), was of a nature that made it impossible to have the resources on the ground quickly, and had a President in office that you did not like.
That said, many people are in place making large amounts of money to handle such difficult situations. In both cases, it did not happen.
And keep in mind that 36 days after Katrina, the resources were in place. 36 days after the explosion, materials to contain the oil are still MIA.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:48 am
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