Bush Accused of Delay on Drilling Review : Despite Pledge, Task Force on Offshore Oil Has Not Been Created

The White House, praised last month for pledging to review the future of offshore drilling, has dragged its feet since then, failing to even create the task force that President Bush said would advise him on the issue, sources in the Administration and environmental community charged Friday.

Delays with the task force, whose exact composition still is to be determined, have provoked tensions in the Administration, with some officials charging that the White House exploited Bush’s dramatic announcement last month postponing drilling off Northern and Southern California but never planned beyond it.

“They conceived the beginning, but they never conceived the end,” an Administration official charged, noting that for now: “The word from the White House is to cool it (on the issue).”

Recommendations Due

The task force was to make recommendations to Bush by next Jan. 1 on proposed drilling in two vast California tracts--Lease Sale 91, off the Northern coast, and Lease Sale 95, covering the coast south of Santa Barbara--and a third area in Florida.

In its absence, the Administration has been left without guidance on offshore drilling at a time when officials are being peppered with questions about possibly expanding the drilling moratorium, including to Lease Sale 119 off the coast of Central California.

A White House official denied, however, that the delay reflected any backing away from the decision to name a task force. “To the extent it’s slowed up, it’s not an intentional slow-up,” he said. “People are just behind in their work.” The task force members will be named “soon,” perhaps as early as next week, he said.

An aide to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) also insisted the lack of progress did not reflect deliberate neglect.

“If this were an isolated incident, it would be very easy to put political reasons behind the inaction,” said Wilson aide Bill Livingstone. But, he said: “The logic of the situation obviously is that people aren’t in place to make decisions yet.”

With the task force stalled, Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr., the panel’s appointed chairman, decided to avoid a tour of Florida drilling sites while on a trip there today, his office said Friday.

Lujan last month sent letters to chiefs of other agencies who are to serve on the panel, proposing that the task force meet as soon as possible. But a department spokesman, Steve Goldstein, confirmed that there are no plans for a meeting in the near future.

“The decisions regarding the makeup of the task force and its full mandate are being considered at staff level in the White House,” he said. “The secretary is ready and willing to begin and is just awaiting further instructions.”

Called More Serious

Another source said the delay was far more serious. “Not only has the task force not met,” the source said, “but they don’t know who’s going to be in the meeting.”

Officials close to the process said the White House remains undecided about how high a profile the panel should assume.

In the closing months of the presidential campaign, Bush announced in a major California appearance that he would ask then-President Ronald Reagan to postpone decisions on offshore drilling so Bush could review the matter thoroughly after the election.

Bush’s subsequent call for a drilling task force, made in his budget address to Congress, was viewed as a peace offering to environmentalists and as fulfillment of his campaign promise.

As originally proposed, the panel was to be headed by the Interior Department and include representatives of the Energy Department and the National Academy of Sciences. It was to make recommendations only about proposed drilling in the two California tracts and in another off Florida’s Gulf Coast.

In response to concern from environmentalists and legislators, the White House announced that the panel would be expanded to include representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But sources said debate continues within the White House about whether the panel should focus only on the California and Florida tracts or generally review the future of drilling.

Pressed on the issue, Lujan has said he expects the task force’s recommendations will have “ramifications beyond just the three lease tracts.” But his spokesman reiterated Friday that “that’s a decision that the White House has to make.”

Offshore drilling opponents in the environmental community said they regarded the slow progress as an indication that Bush was less concerned about hazards of drilling than his early statements indicated.

“We need some high-level attention to really get this process back on track,” said Lisa Speer, a staff scientist with the Natural Resource Defense Council. But the task force, she said, appeared to be “sort of a token gesture, not a real commitment.”

Robert Hattoy, Los Angeles regional director of the Sierra Club, observed: “The White House received all kinds of favorable press by calling for the task force. This makes clear that we can’t trust the safety of the coastline to some kind of nebulous good intentions.”