New Outrage in the Gulf

Could Congress have prevented the BP mess? A report reveals that a law enacted after the Exxon Valdez to avoid future oil spills was deprived of cash by lawmakers.

President Obama’s commission investigating the disastrous BP oil spill quietly issued a draft report on the response last week, and within that document, largely unnoticed, emerged a damning finger pointed directly at Congress for failing to heed the lessons of the Exxon Valdez.

Specifically, in 1990, shortly after Exxon’s 750,000-barrel Alaska catastrophe, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act to funnel up to $28 million in research money annually to pre-empt and respond to possible disasters, as the oil industry “pushed the frontier of deepwater drilling.” This money wouldn’t come from the general coffers, but rather a trust fund, covered by a 5-cent per-barrel tax collected from the oil industry.

But over the ensuing 20 years, the report states, the piggy bank got raided: Congress never appropriated even half the $28 million, shifting the money elsewhere, leaving the the Coast Guard, Minerals Management Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency—the four agencies charged by the law to combat the spill threat—with technology that hadn’t been updated much in nearly two decades.

The commission’s report also pointed fingers at private-sector R&D efforts, and found similar fault in terms of dedicating resources to response and clean-up technology. But Congress, in passing the law, had seemingly done the right thing. Year after year, through, it starved that initiative by refusing to appropriate the money called for.

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