Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Obama's Gulf war

Mr. Obama is failing in two critical responsibilities. First is his role as interagency coordinator. As chief executive, the president is charged with coordinating interagency responses to crises, which entails establishing clear lines of authority, allocating resources across bureaucratic boundaries and ensuring that agencies work in a cooperative fashion to mount a coherent and effective response. Mr. Obama's team got off to a rocky start. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano failed to request support from the Navy to assist in the oil-spill response, later confessing she didn't know about the Navy's considerable oil-spill-response resources. The incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, was unaware of a company in Maine standing idle that could produce 90,000 feet of containment boom a day until a journalist brought it to his attention. Mr. Obama's administration stood in the way of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposal to block the encroaching oil by constructing temporary sandbars. This week, Mr. Jindal decided to press ahead anyway. Mr. Obama's announced six-month moratorium on oil and natural-gas drilling in the Gulf will do more economic harm to the region than the spill itself. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar defended the policy, saying it was reviewed by a team of experts from the National Academy of Engineering, but the experts later released a letter saying the "moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors."...more

No comments: