Thirteen US Senate Democrats and Independent Bernard Sanders (Vt.) urged two Department of the Interior interim leaders to stop using Bureau of Ocean Energy Management employees to continue preparing upcoming federal offshore oil and gas lease sales during the partial government shutdown.
“We urge you to reverse the decision to continue this work and to direct any funds available to BOEM toward critical bureau functions that have been hampered under the ongoing government shutdown, rather than toward actions that directly benefit the oil industry,” they said in their Jan. 23 letter to Acting Interior Sec. David Bernhardt and Acting BOEM Director Walter D. Cruickshank.
“We remain opposed to any efforts to further develop an American offshore oil and gas industry which would threaten our economy and our environment. But we are particularly concerned regarding the process that resulted in allowing these activities to occur during the partial government shutdown, which has left 800,000 federal employees unpaid,” the letter said.
“While the oil industry might view a delay in the approval of new offshore drilling as an emergency, the American people deserve regulators who prioritize safety and environmental regulation over political expediency and the wishes of moneyed special interests,” it said.
Sens. Robert Menendez (NJ) and Edward E. Markey (Mass.) instigated the letter 6 days after House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and two other House Democrats called the maneuver farcical and clear evidence that the Trump administration “cares only about the impacts on its favorite industry and not about workers, their families, and ordinary Americans (OGJ Online, Jan. 17, 2019).”
A federal judge in South Carolina issued an injunction on Jan. 18 stopping BOEM’s processing of applications for offshore oil and gas seismic permits on the US Mid-Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf during the federal government’s partial shutdown (OGJ Online, Jan. 21, 2019).
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].
