Norton said the Bush administration focused primarily on onshore drilling and that there "was really not much change as to the outer continental shelf."
Henry Waxman gets it right, including not giving Team Obama a pass:
The Interior Department under both Bush and Obama made serious mistakes, Waxman said.
"The cop on the beat was off duty for nearly a decade," he said. "And this gave rise to a dangerous culture of permissiveness."
Recommendations by Cheney's energy task force and Norton's failure to act on safety warnings about blowout preventers and rejection of proposals to strengthen standards for cementing wells sent a clear message that "the priority was more drilling first, safety second," Waxman said.
Kempthorne oversaw the "deeply flawed assessment" of potential environmental impacts of the lease sale, and MMS's mission became "to serve the oil and gas industry," he added. But Congress "was complicit in this lack of oversight," failing to strengthen regulatory requirements, Waxman said.
"As a Democrat, I hoped the Obama administration would do better and, in some ways, there have been reforms," Waxman said. "But there is little evidence that these reforms changed the laissez-faire approach of MMS in regulating the BP well."
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