Questions Raised by E-Mail on Energy

An e-mail from a high-ranking staff member of the Bush administration’s energy task force said officials were “desperately trying to avoid California” in a report dealing with the energy crisis last year, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) said Monday.

The e-mail, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by watchdog and environmental groups and also provided to Waxman, was largely redacted and neither administration officials nor the congressman could say specifically what the task force staffer was discussing.

But Waxman seized on the missive to turn up the heat on the White House to release all documents relating to the task force’s discussions about California’s energy crisis.

Waxman said the e-mail, along with the recent release of documents showing Enron sought to manipulate the California energy market, “underscores the need for the administration to provide a complete accounting of its understanding of and approach to the energy crisis.”

“It is important to know what, if anything, the administration knew about Enron’s efforts to manipulate the California energy market,” Waxman said in a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney, who chaired the task force.

The e-mail was sent May 4, 2001, by Karen Knutson, deputy director of the energy task force, to Environmental Protection Agency official Jacob Moss. It raised concerns about putting into the report a paragraph “emphasizing environmentally difficult issues about expediting permitting to deal with a crisis.”

“We are desperately trying to avoid California in this report as much as possible,” it continues. “Can you make the same point without going into California?”

Knutson could not be reached for comment, and administration officials could not say what it was about California that she sought to keep out of the report. But they defended their actions on California’s energy crisis.

“Congressman Waxman has confused the Bush administration with the lack of action taken by the Clinton administration,” said Energy Department spokeswoman Jeanne Lopatto. She said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, on Bush’s watch, imposed electricity price controls and launched an investigation into whether Enron and other power sellers sought to use their market power to drive up prices.

The task force report released last year features California prominently, using the state’s problems to bolster its arguments for building more power plants.

Waxman said the e-mail appeared to have come to light through an “inadvertent failure on the part of EPA to redact information it had intended to redact.”

He said it raised questions about whether the widespread deletion of information from thousands of pages of documents turned over by federal agencies were the result of the administration’s claims that disclosure would chill frank and open discussion or were intended to avoid embarrassment.

Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise called Waxman’s letter “another in a long list of politically motivated letters that Congressman Waxman regularly sends out.”

She said the purpose of the administration’s national energy plan was “to develop a strategic, long-term energy policy for the country

Waxman’s letter was the latest salvo in a yearlong effort by congressional Democrats to force the administration to make public details of private meetings held with lobbyists during drafting of the energy plan.

The battle was fired up last week with the release of internal Enron memos that detailed an array of Enron price-manipulation strategies. Two Senate committees plan hearings on the memos Wednesday.

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate subcommittee on consumer affairs, said he plans to grill the authors of the Enron memos to “try to figure out who was involved in creating the strategies” and how far up in Enron’s management knowledge of the strategies reached.

Dorgan said he also expects to question an official from FERC, probably its chairman, Patrick H. Wood III, to find out “what it knew and what it didn’t know and why.”

“It was a horrible failure on the part of regulators,” Dorgan said in an interview Monday. “FERC was sitting on its hands.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a member of the subcommittee on consumer affairs, cited California’s budget problems Monday in urging Wood to act swiftly to complete its price-manipulation investigation and provide refunds and renegotiated energy contracts, “so other vital services, such as health care and education, do not have to be cut to continue to pay for manipulated electricity prices.”