Understanding Government

In a recent article that hasn’t gotten much attention, Ron Nixon of the New York Times exposes a major problem with government contractors who get out of line.  When a federal agency wants to stop working with them (a process called “debarring”), sometimes they can’t:  the contractors are too important and too essential to the agency’s supply chain or service requirements.  BP, for example, is such a key supplier of fuel to the government that after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, when EPA officials wanted to make an example of BP by ending their involvement in government contracts government-wide, “the Pentagon objected: BP was its biggest supplier of fuel.

With no way to say no, the government continues to reward bad behavior.

Who knew?  Turns out there’s an oil company called BP that is responsible for releasing petrochemicals into the environment without telling people.  James C. McKinley, Jr. reports in the New York Times on BP’s latest travesty in Texas (they’re good at creating disasters over in Louisiana, but in Texas they’ve outdone themselves — it’s all about being consistent).  (more…)

It could be a breakthrough for electricity generation, or an innovation Americans will come to regret.

Funded in part by stimulus and other federal funds, a planned California power plant would convert coal and petroleum coke into hydrogen which would then be burned for electricity. According to Will Evans of CaliforniaWatch, the key feature of the new plant, to be built and run by BP and a joint venture partner with strong BP roots, is “carbon sequestration,” the modern day alchemist’s holy grail that will (more…)

Frank Rich says Michael Hastings’s scoop points out the Washington press elite’s laziness and inability to dig for the real story.  Hastings, he says, “seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did.”  The preference of Washington reporters and bloggers for the easy story was chronicled early by Understanding Government’s founder, Charles Peters, in his book How Washington Really Works (nice of Google to make Charlie’s book available for free).

Getting stories out from inside government agencies is never easy, and in today’s fractured media environment, publications can claim they don’t have the money it takes to cover federal agencies aggressively.  But, as Rich points out, “Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai.”  What’s more, Rolling Stone‘s latest issue also has a second installment of Tim Dickinson’s investigation of the lax enforcement environment at the Interior Department even after “Obama’s sheriff” Ken Salazar took the agency’s helm.  The first installment was published 14 months ago.

The subhead in the New York Times says “U.S. Concedes It Must Rely on BP for Help.” The Washington Post writes “Obama administration conflicted about relying on BP to stop gulf oil spill,” which is the approach the Post often takes to turn a national story into a Washington story and keep it alive.  More informative is the Post’s own blogger, Joel Achenbach.

And as the federal government struggles to cope with an unprecedented disaster, don’t let any comparisons with Hurricane Katrina fool you.  Government neither can nor should be responsible for the cleanup of a disaster caused not by force-majeure but by a private corporation’s own errors.  BP is both responsible for the spill and for the cleanup.  It owns the oil — whereever that oil may end up.