The Interior Department responded late Tuesday to the House Natural Resources Committee’s subpoena for documents related to the imposition of the May 2010 moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). However, the House panel said the department’s reply was “noncompliant,” which came more than five hours after a noon deadline.

“The department has failed to comply with the subpoena and its response is extremely disappointing given the costly toll the Obama administration’s drilling moratorium imposed on thousands of workers and American energy production,” said Spencer Pederson, a spokesman for Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), chairman of the committee (see Daily GPI, April 11).

“The subpoena was very plainly worded. All the department had to do was provide communications involving five officials on a specific topic over a two-month period; and 13 documents they intervened and blocked the Interior inspector general from providing to the committee. The department has refused to meet even this low, simple bar of transparency,” he said.

Pederson noted that Hastings plans to comment once he has had the opportunity to “fully consider” Interior’s response. The committee earlier this month subpoenaed documents related to the report, which was allegedly altered by the Obama administration to suggest that experts from the National Academy of Engineering had endorsed the moratorium on deepwater drilling when in fact it had not (see Daily GPI, March 30).

In a letter to the House committee Tuesday, Interior’s Christopher Mansour, director of Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs, wrote that “the department is disappointed that after nearly a year of working with your staff to understand and accommodate the committee’s asserted interests in the [May 2010] report, we have reached a point where the committee has taken the unnecessary and precipitous step of issuing a subpoena.” The administration’s May 2010 report recommended that a moratorium be imposed on deepwater drilling in the GOM following the Macondo well blowout that led to an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, which resulted in 11 men being killed (see Daily GPI, April 22, 2010).

In the past year since the committee began its investigation, Mansour noted that Interior has responded to the committee’s requests by “producing nearly 1,000 pages of documents as well as making multiple offers of accommodation that have included in camera reviews of documents and briefings in which we have provided information directly responsive to the committee’s articulated concerns.”

In response to the subpoena, Interior Tuesday turned over 164 pages of additional communications with the peer reviewers from the National Academy of Engineering, “with an additional production [of materials] to occur later this week,” Mansour said. The documents “will demonstrate that, as the department has said all along, the peer reviewers applied their expertise to the technical recommendations in the [May 2010] report and were not asked to review the secretary’s policy recommendations regarding the moratorium.”

Interior also has offered for in camera review the May 25, 2010 draft of the executive summary of the moratorium report, as well as in camera review of a draft of the executive summary that was exchanged between Interior and the White House on May 26, 2010, prior to the report being issued, he said.

In July 2010 Hastings and another Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee called on Interior Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall to open an investigation into allegations that the Obama administration altered peer-reviewed recommendations by experts in the report to justify the deepwater drilling moratorium (see Daily GPI, July 23, 2010).

Kendall’s office concluded later in 2010 that the White House changed the Interior report to suggest that experts peer reviewed and supported the administration’s decision to impose a blanket moratorium on drilling in the GOM (see Daily GPI, Nov. 12, 2010). The Obama administration said the alteration was due to “last minute editing,” but Hastings’ committee is trying to determine whether there was more involved.

In the report, Interior said it drew expertise from “within the federal government, academia, professional engineers, industry and other governments’ regulatory programs.” In particular, the report said seven members of the National Academy of Engineering peer-reviewed the recommendations, implying that they supported the proposal to impose a drilling moratorium.

However, the peer reviewers were not in fact asked to evaluate the drilling ban, which was inserted into the report shortly before it was finalized and without any scientific or technical review or analysis of economic impacts, according to the committee.

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