Oil spill panel chief ‘mystified’ by block on subpoena power

The co-chairman of the presidential commission probing the BP oil spill took aim Thursday at Senate lawmakers who withheld subpoena power for the panel, which is nearing completion of its months-long probe.

The House twice passed bills that would grant subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

But Senate Republicans blocked that authority, and several have alleged the panel is tilted toward anti-drilling advocates.

Commission co-chairman Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, said Thursday that the obstruction made the investigation more difficult.

“I am very impressed by what we have been able to accomplish without subpoena power,” he said.

“I remain mystified as to why a few senators decided to deny this commission this power when subpoena power has been granted as almost an absolute for congressional commissions which have analogous responsibilities to ours,” Graham added, although he did not call out the GOP specifically.

“The lack of subpoena power has made our commission’s work more difficult. Our success is a testament both to the determination and skill of our team and to the plain fact that the problems and deficiencies of the current safety regime are so egregious,” Graham added.

He spoke at the commission’s final public deliberations in Washington, D.C., ahead of its January report to the White House on the “root causes” of the spill and recommended reforms.

Graham and co-chairman William Reilly — a Republican who lead the EPA under President George H.W. Bush — again signaled Thursday they are preparing a broad report that will indict inadequate federal regulation, several companies involved in the spill and the industry’s safety culture as a whole.

Reilly said he came into the role thinking BP was an outlier, a “rogue” company with years of safety woes that didn’t reflect the industry overall.

But, he said, the probe has revealed “three major companies were fully implicated in the catastrophe,” a reference to BP, Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean and Halliburton, the oil services giant that handled the cementing work on BP’s ill-fated Macondo well.

“Our staff further reported that other companies had no effective containment preparations and laughable response plans,” he added.

“The poor state of containment and response plans and capability in the Gulf of Mexico is indisputable evidence of a widespread lack of serious preparation, of planning, of management. That culture must change,” Reilly said.

Graham also suggested the panel might wade more deeply into U.S. energy policy.

“America’s current energy non-policy is unsustainable,” Graham said, noting the U.S. accounts for about 22 percent of global oil consumption yet has only 3 percent of known reserves.

“This commission has an opportunity to speak to this radical imbalance which threatens our national security,” Graham said.

The seven-member panel is spending the next two days wading through a suite of staff findings on industry practices, such inadequate risk analysis, regulatory oversight, Arctic drilling and other matters.