Congressional officials raised particular concerns about the safety of a second BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and about regulators’ failure to spend millions of dollars approved for oil spill research, among other issues, according to e-mails between Congressional officials and regulators at the Minerals Management Service, as the agency was then known.
When officials at the agency told members of Congress in 2009 that they could not specifically respond to concerns about the potential for a “catastrophic” accident on a second BP rig off New Orleans, known as the Atlantis, some staff members were livid at what they viewed as stonewalling.
“Just so I have this straight,” an aide to Representative Sander M. Levin, a Michigan Democrat, wrote in an e-mail to a mineral agency official, “I am to tell my boss that M.M.S. has nothing to say about this Atlantis business” beyond the general comments it had already made?
The e-mail and other recent correspondence between federal regulators and Congressional officials were among more than 5,400 pages of documents that the Interior Department turned over to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20 led to intense scrutiny of the relationship between federal regulators and the oil industry — a relationship critics say has historically been too cozy. But much less attention has been paid to the regulators’ relationship with members of Congress, who also play a critical role in overseeing and shaping regulatory policies and priorities.
The documents offer a window into a relationship between drill regulators and Congressional officials that has been, at various turns, civil and businesslike, distant and contentious or, as is often the case in Washington, fawning and solicitous when members were looking to help a constituent gain business.
For instance, when a businessman in Alaska was upset because his aviation company was being shut out of an aerial surveying contract, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, urged the regulators to reconsider the contract, the e-mails show.
(The Interior Department stood by its decision; it told Mr. Stevens in a 2008 letter that the company — whose owners had donated to Republican causes — did not have the safety equipment or training to do the job.)
Members and their aides also went to regulators to get a jump on coming drilling decisions that might have political implications, the documents show.
But at other times, federal regulators had a hard time getting the attention of anyone on Capitol Hill, the documents show.
For instance, officials at the minerals agency went to dozens of members of Congress on relevant committees in the fall of 2009 to try to set up meet-and-greet sessions for the newly named director of the agency, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum.
Most members passed on the invitation. “Unfortunately, Senator Bunning is unable to meet with Liz Birnbaum,” an aide to Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican, said. “Thank you for the offer though!”
But six months later, as the BP disaster set off one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, Ms. Birnbaum’s agency was seemingly on everyone’s mind in Congress — with its regulatory failings suddenly under sharp scrutiny from politicians and the public.
Under fire, Ms. Birnbaum quickly stepped down from her job, her agency was reorganized and renamed in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the BP disaster, and federal regulators there were getting hundreds of oil-drilling inquiries a day from Capitol Hill — along with frequent notes of sympathy — as the oil spread.
“Hang in there,” read one e-mail from a Congressional staff member to a minerals agency official weeks after the spill began.
But other Congressional officials were less sympathetic as they demanded that the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, turn over its records about the approval of the BP project and other regulatory measures.
The records show that even after the spill, officials at the minerals agency resisted turning over some records on the grounds that they held “proprietary” information that belonged to BP.
But some of the information the agency was willing to provide was illuminating. In an April 2009 letter that regulators sent to BP approving exploration in the area where the explosion later took place, they urged BP to “exercise caution while drilling due to indications of shallow gas and possible water flow.”
Various facets of the BP disaster, including the exact cause of the explosion and the failure of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer, are still under investigation by a presidential commission and other investigative bodies. But preliminary findings released last month found that both the oil industry and the government were caught unprepared by the spill, delaying the response.
Before the spill, the Minerals Management Service was a relatively obscure agency, known mostly for a scandal that cost the government billions in unpaid oil royalties and a resulting investigation that revealed that regulators had sexual and financial relationships with industry representatives they were overseeing.
A review of the correspondence between the agency and Congressional officials in the year before the BP spill shows that when lawmakers did take an interest in the agency, it often centered on revenues for their states or possible business ties of constituents or donors.
For instance, when the Interior Department announced a $115 million sale of new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2009, Congressional aides in districts from Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere quickly approached the agency to determine the financial cuts for their states, the documents show.
In January 2009, Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, complained to the agency about an unexplained drop-off in royalties to Imperial County, in the state’s southeast, from a geothermal plant there that had been producing more than a million dollars a year for the county.
But some members of Congress — particularly those with concerns about expanding offshore drilling — were pressing regulators about safety and environmental issues long before the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Concerns about the safety of the Atlantis, a 58,000-ton platform that is considered one of BP’s most technically challenging projects, grew in 2009 after complaints from a private group, Food and Water Watch. It began a grass-roots campaign to have constituents contact their lawmakers with concerns that grew out of a whistle-blower’s claims of safety deficiencies.
Lyn Herdt, head of Congressional affairs for the agency, said in an interview this week that legal concerns surrounding the case prevented the agency from saying much even to members of Congress. “It did cause problems,” Ms. Herdt said. “We provided them as much as we could give them, and we apologized, but I’m sure they got frustrated with not getting answers.”
The Interior Department later opened a formal investigation into the safety concerns about the Atlantis. That review was supposed to be done in October, but officials said newly developed information has pushed back the completion.
By: Erick Richtblau (ny times)
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