Minerals Management Service tried to play catch-up after lapses in ethics, oversight
By Juliet Eilperin and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 29, 2010
At the conclusion of a more than two-hour meeting Wednesday night in the Oval Office, President Obama turned to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and made clear that he had to do more to ensure that his agency could manage the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a growing problem for an administration that prides itself on competence.
"You need to have people in the top jobs who can actually do them," Obama told Salazar, according to one senior administration official who attended the meeting.
Salazar, a politically savvy former senator from Colorado, responded that he had lost confidence in Elizabeth Birnbaum, the director of the Minerals Management Service, adding that he would soon be making changes. The next morning, Salazar and his deputy secretary David Hayes knocked on Birnbaum's office door and told her they planned to move her to another job; she resigned instead.
But Birnbaum's abrupt departure, coming just 10 months after she had taken the agency's helm, says more about the Obama administration's inability to improve MMS and the industry it regulates than Birnbaum herself. Facing a historically troubled agency, Salazar and his top deputies focused first on promoting easy-to-achieve changes and offshore wind development rather than conducting a broad agency overhaul.
(More here.)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 29, 2010
At the conclusion of a more than two-hour meeting Wednesday night in the Oval Office, President Obama turned to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and made clear that he had to do more to ensure that his agency could manage the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a growing problem for an administration that prides itself on competence.
"You need to have people in the top jobs who can actually do them," Obama told Salazar, according to one senior administration official who attended the meeting.
Salazar, a politically savvy former senator from Colorado, responded that he had lost confidence in Elizabeth Birnbaum, the director of the Minerals Management Service, adding that he would soon be making changes. The next morning, Salazar and his deputy secretary David Hayes knocked on Birnbaum's office door and told her they planned to move her to another job; she resigned instead.
But Birnbaum's abrupt departure, coming just 10 months after she had taken the agency's helm, says more about the Obama administration's inability to improve MMS and the industry it regulates than Birnbaum herself. Facing a historically troubled agency, Salazar and his top deputies focused first on promoting easy-to-achieve changes and offshore wind development rather than conducting a broad agency overhaul.
(More here.)
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