Transparency

When President Obama established the external pageNational Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drillingcall_made, he promised that it would leave no stone unturned in its quest for answers about the spill – and the government’s response.

In the external pagefour interim reportscall_made released last week, the commission showed it did not intend to spare the hand that established it.

Commission staff were blunt in their assessment that the administration had appeared either ineffective or dishonest about the scale of the disaster in the first few weeks.

“By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of the summer, appearing to underestimate the amount of oil remaining in the Gulf, the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem,” states external pageone of the reportscall_made.

Indeed, as the report reminds us, it was several days before officials acknowledged there was a spill at all.

“At this time there is no crude emanating from that wellhead at the ocean floor [. . .] there is no oil emanating from the riser either,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry, the official in charge of the government’s response team, told external pageCBS Newscall_made on April 23, three days after the explosion that sent the Deepwater Horizon to the bottom of the ocean and killed 11 of its crew.

But, as the report notes, “at the time of Admiral Landry’s statement, the riser had not yet been inspected.”

Worst-case scenario

Indeed, that very same day, BP sent the US Coast Guard and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) its worst-case estimate of the spill volume – between 64,000 and 110,000 barrels per day. As the report notes, this became the baseline estimate that responders were using internally. It “appeared in both an internal Coast Guard Situation Report and on a dry-erase board in the NOAA Seattle war room.”

Yet for four more weeks the administration continued to declare in public that its best estimate of the rate of spill was only 5,000 barrels a day.

The real rate, of course, turned out to be much closer to the “worst case” figures, and the report says the government’s attitude to its own public estimates was “casual.”

Government-as-usual

In its response to the interim report, the White House said that, since the government was already doing all it could to stop the spill, and the worst case figures were being discussed on national television, the fact that officials had stuck to their public underestimates was immaterial.

“It was the largest environmental disaster that we have ever faced and we attacked it with the largest federal response,” White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs external pagesaidcall_made. “We did all that was humanly possible in the most challenging of environments.”

But by playing down the severity of the spill in public when they knew already how bad the numbers really were – and then claiming afterwards their lack of candor was unimportant because behind the scenes they were working as hard as they could anyway – the Obama administration was taking a page from the standard Washington spin playbook.

This is exactly the kind of government-as-usual that Obama pledged to do away with when he external pagepromisedcall_made to make his administration “the most open and transparent in history.”

And it is only the latest way in which the administration has disappointed many good government advocates on this key issue.

Secrecy and transparency

Last month, a external pagecoalitioncall_made of more than 70 open government groups issued a external pagescorecardcall_made on the administration’s secrecy, giving Obama’s administration mixed reviews.

"The elections of 2008 were viewed by many as a referendum on the secrecy and unaccountability of the Bush administration,” external pagesaidcall_made Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, “The record to date is mixed, but some indicators are trending in the right direction."

While the number of new secrets the government was creating had fallen slightly since the Bush administration, the report found, the backlog of historical documents scheduled for declassification after 25 years continued to rise.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government secrecy told the ISN that the declassification center created by the administration to tackle that backlog would have to process 100 million pages a year to reach its target of elimination by 2013.

It had processed eight million or so in the first six months. “They are going to have to ramp up,” he said, adding that he credited the administration for “moving in the right direction.”

“A snapshot at any given moment might seem discouraging,” he said, “But the momentum is there.”

Nonetheless, in March, external pagea surveycall_made by the Associated Press found that the administration was also lagging on another key transparency issue – the number of times it asserted documents were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA.

In fiscal year 2009, 17 major US agencies claimed FOIA exemptions at least 466,872 times, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, even though the number of requests for exemptions was actually lower in 2009 – meaning they were granted with greater leniency in 2009.

And the Obama administration has also continued to external pagevigorously prosecutecall_made those who leak classified information to the media, even when they could accurately be called external pagewhistleblowerscall_made – and while senior officials were external pagegiven the okaycall_made to share highly classified information with iconic reporter Bob Woodward for his latest behind-the-scenes presidential blockbuster.

Grinding slow

Aftergood said that, when it came to FOIA and classification issues, “directions from the top often take time to filter down.”
“The wheels are grinding slowly, but they are grinding,” he said.

He pointed out that the Pentagon had only last week released new FOIA regulations implementing a presidential directive from more than a year ago.

The problem, as so often in Washington, is one of institutional inertia. Career bureaucrats and the agencies they have built and inhabit know that administrations, even two-term ones, are (relatively speaking) fleeting things – and their attention to a particular issue or problem can be more fleeting still.

For the entrenched bureaucrats of the Pentagon – and their civilian counterparts in the sprawling collection of US spy agencies – it is often all too easy to just wait out the White House until its occupant, or its focus, changes.

If the president is serious about his transparency agenda, he needs to make it clear that such delay will not be tolerated. He needs to reinforce his commitment to transparency.

Acknowledging that his administration was wrong to stick to its 5,000 barrel a day figure – rather than trying to claim it didn’t matter, as his underlings are currently doing – might be a good start.