The General Accounting Office (GAO) said Monday it was unable to determine conclusively the extent to which energy executives and companies may have influenced the drafting of the Bush administration’s national energy policy due to the successful efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney and other energy task force members to stall its investigation.

“The extent to which submissions from any of these [energy or other] stakeholders were solicited, influenced policy deliberations, or were incorporated into the final [national energy] report is not something that we can determine based on the limited information at our disposal,” said the investigative arm of Congress in its report on the energy task force to lawmakers.

The report comes almost seven months after the GAO dropped its year-long legal pursuit to force the Bush White House to turn over the names of energy executives who may have impacted the finished national energy policy product. The agency withdrew its lawsuit against Cheney in early February after a federal court dismissed the case.

The Bush White House had refused to furnish the sought-after information to the GAO on the grounds that it would encroach on the authority of the executive branch. It marked the first time that GAO had brought legal action against the executive branch to compel production of information and records.

The 24-page report confirmed that Cheney, who chaired the energy task force, had met with former Enron Chairman Ken Lay to “discuss energy policy matters” while the administration’s energy policy was being drafted, as well as other parties. But “we cannot determine the extent to which any of these communications with [task force] principals affected the content or development of the final report,” the GAO said.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI) had requested that the GAO investigate the energy task proceedings in response to press reports that top Bush administration officials had sought advice from Lay and other energy officials when formulating the energy plan.

The Department of Energy (DOE), a key task force member, “reported that the Secretary of Energy discussed national energy policy with chief executive officers of petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical and natural gas companies, among others,” the GAO noted.

The task force met 10 times between Jan. 29 and May 16, 2001. “According to OVP [Office of Vice President] staff and other federal officials who attended these formal meetings, attendance was strictly limited to officers and employees of the federal government…However, no party provided us with any documentary evidence to support or negate this assertion,” the report noted.

“None of the key federal entities involved in the [task force] effort provided us with a complete accounting of the costs they incurred during the development of the national energy policy report,” GAO said. The Office of the Vice President turned over 77 pages of information, “two-thirds of which contained no cost information, while the remaining one-third contained miscellaneous information of little to no usefulness.”

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