Cheney's Flawed Energy Blueprint

[MORTARDUDE]

Cheney's Flawed Energy Blueprint

Published: Aug 29, 2003

R epublican leaders vow to push through a version of President Bush's energy bill when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day.
The nation needs farsighted policies that will help the nation become more energy independent. But the proposals developed by Vice President Cheney are designed chiefly to serve the energy industry, not the public.

The nonpartisan General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress that has been trying to determine who was involved in devising the administration's energy proposals, found that Cheney's task force relied chiefly on ``petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists'' but sought virtually no advice from academics, environmentalists or consumer groups.

The administration's plan would provide billions of dollars of tax breaks to energy companies, weaken environmental rules and open vast tracts of public lands to oil drillers. Yet it would do little to promote energy conservation or encourage use of clean-burning fuels.

The GAO filed the report though Cheney had refused to provide information about the task force's secret meetings. An unfortunate court ruling and pressure from Republican leaders caused the GAO to drop its legal pursuit of the information.

Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club have so far been successful in their separate legal fight for the energy records, though the administration continues to withhold the documents.

Democratic candidates, you can be sure, will make much of the GAO report. But its findings should not be dismissed as political maneuvering. David M. Walker, director of the GAO, is a Republican. He told The Washington Post that the government's refusal to turn over relevant documents called into question the existence of ``an appropriate degree of accountability in government.''

He added, ``The Congress and the American people had the right to know the limited amount of information we were seeking.''

What the GAO did learn indicates that Cheney's task force was interested solely in industry's viewpoint, not in considering a wide range of options.

Kenneth L. Lay, former chairman of the disgraced Enron Corp., was among those who met with Cheney. The National Mining Association, Chevron Corp. and other companies and associations gave extensive recommendations to the task force.

In contrast, citizens groups and environmentalists were essentially ignored. The GAO found that even though the White House sought to increase oil and gas exploration on public lands, it didn't assign the Interior Department ``a lead role in writing'' any of the task force's report chapters.

The GAO also concluded the task force was ``a centralized, top-down'' process that involved a few hundred federal employees but did not seek out the advice of nonpolitical government officials.

The administration's energy task force - secretive, exclusive and dismissive of outside ideas - stands as a blueprint for how not to develop sound public policy. Members of Congress would be wise to keep their distance from this flawed effort.