Heritage Foundation Remembers the Gulf

It is Day 79 of the BP oil spill, and just this weekend tar balls from the spill washed up on Texas beaches. Over a hundred million gallons of oil have been released into our waters. And yet where is our President? He spent the 4^th of July playing golf and hosting a barbeque on the White House lawn. Apparently some people want the new “normal” to be an oil-ridden Gulf.

But we at The Heritage Foundation are not satisfied with this new norm. So this week we are sending a team of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf region to investigate what is and is not working and what more needs to be done (or in many cases, where the federal government should simply step out of the way) to get the Gulf cleaned up.

Since the explosion on April 20, the outflow of oil has gotten worse, goals have been missed, and attention has waned on this horrible situation. When the president last took questions from the press at the G20, not a single reporter asked him an oil spill related question. It seems the mainstream media is more concerned with blaming BP for the spill than actually cleaning it up. And while BP should not escape blame for the spill or their less-than-promised skimming abilities, the federal government should also be held to task for their less-than-efficient clean up operation.

Five years ago, the bureaucracy of state, local, and federal governments made the disaster after Hurricane Katrina worse. And that bureaucracy is at work again, hindering the clean up efforts of the oil spill.

Bureaucracy and lack of leadership allowed foreign offers of assistance to be rejected and skimmers with massive capacity to go unused. Local authorities were unnecessarily stopped from dredging by environmental regulations. As my colleague points out, “the environmentalists who wish to protect our nation from some uncertain catastrophe are ignoring the one happening right this very moment.”

But The Heritage Foundation is on the case. In the coming weeks we will be reporting on the ground about the Gulf, rather than just writing about it in Washington. We will have pictures, videos, and the latest scoops from the Gulf. The President needs to wake up to the disaster in the Gulf, and Heritage intends to provide the alarm clock.