AT LAST. AFTER MISSING MY CHANCE during the Nixon years, I’ve finally gotten myself onto an enemies list. True, this is a relatively trivial one, consisting merely of journalists and “sources” who have somehow antagonized Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary. But a “source” has to take such crumbs of hostile recognition as fall from the table of the mighty.
And mighty Secretary O’Leary is. Her $ 18 billion budget permits her to travel widely and in style, more widely than the secretary of state, according to Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, and “with a larger entourage,” in the words of the New York Times. And to hire consultants to identify anyone who sees in her the Peter Principle at work. The geographic spread of her empire permits her to threaten senators from New Mexico (Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories), California (labs managed by the University of California), and New York (Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island) with the economic devastation of facilities” closures if they trim her budget. And the 100,000-plus contract workers beholden to the Energy Department constitute a private army with a strong incentive to protect her from budgetary harm.
But they apparently cannot shield her from the adverse publicity that so nettles her. Or protect her from the view of many reporters that she has a tendency to substitute charm for hard work. Or generate the favorable publicity that her P.R. staff would garner by (as they put it in a memorandum leaked to the Washington Times) emphasizing her “very interesting persona” and keeping her in the spotlight “to the exlusion” of her staff: “We need to abandon the players in order to promote the coach.” All of this, of course, has nothing to do with the real issues that surfaced when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Energy Department had engaged consultants to monitor the press and other commentators, an exercise that seems to this ” enemy” quite a proper one for any large organization that wants to know whether it is getting its message across.
The first real issue is New Orleans, whence the secretary was forced to defend her department’s excursion into media monitoring. Why New Orleans, the home of mardi gras and jazz? Because that’s where Mrs. O’Leary was when the story broke, on one of her fabled trips, this one to “discuss aid to the oil and gas industries.” So reports the New York Times, an organ so appalled at the thought of having its reporters” work studied that it called for O’Leary’s resignation, something the secretary’s botching of her job never prompted it to do. In this age of budget stringency, when the government is closed down because the president does not find it possible to cut costs sufficiently to balance the budget by 2002, why is his energy secretary dashing off to New Orleans to find ways to give money to the oil and gas industry? Answer: because her department is in the habit of lavishing money on energy producers. Its Office of Fossil Energy, in a continuous hunt for what the department describes as “innovations in [oil] exploration and production technologies,” has spent $ 2.5 billion developing techniques for making coal more environmentally acceptable and for improving extraction techniques for natural gas. Why the oil, coal, and natural gas industries have insufficient means or incentives to engage in such research is a mystery. As is the reason Energy “continues to develop technologies in which the market clearly has no interest,” to borrow the words of a recent Congressional Budget Office report.
Equally important is the self-condemnation contained in Mrs. O’Leary’s defense of her department’s decision to spend $ 46,500 for consultants to separate the good media guys from the bad ones. That sum, O’Leary explains, is a pittance compared with what it would have cost the taxpayers if the department had undertaken the chore itself — $ 170,000, or three and one- half times as much as the private-sector consultants charged. Think of it: The secretary of energy defends her department by proclaiming that it is only one-third as efficient as the private sector. Surely this is a new highwater mark for candor on the part of a cabinet officer. After all, the secretary is inviting the conclusion that we could save two-thirds of her budget, some $ 12 billion per year, if her department would simply go away and turn its work over to the private sector.
Of course, the Department of Energy won’t go away. It spends too much money, in too many places — most notably Senate Budget Committee chairman Pete Domenici’s New Mexico — for Congress to dismantle it. This, despite the fact that authorities ranging from Vice President A1 Gore’s National Performance Review to the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Office of Technology Assessment have repeatedly criticized the department for its inability to meet its obligations with at least minimal efficiency.
Take its weapons cleanup program, one that is continually behind schedule and over budget. It is, said Sen. J. Bennett Johnston early in O’Leary’s tenure, “a grand and glorious mess … No function of government has been as mismanaged as our waste cleanup.” O’Leary has continued that tradition of mismanagement. Earlier this year the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee charged that much of the money Energy spends at its largest cleanup site is being “squandered … There is almost no aspect of the current approach that can withstand close scrutiny.” All this adds up to an expensive mess. The Army Corps of Engineers, after a detailed evaluation of spending at the Department of Energy, found that its costs were “higher than the amounts the Corps would expect to pay for the same work by 42 percent.” A1 Gore’s review group agrees, but predictably stops short of suggesting that the Energy Department be “reinvented” out of business. After all, O’Leary agrees with our very green vice president on the need to spend taxpayers” money on energy sources dear to the hearts of environmentalists, but so costly as to be of no interest to producers or consumers.
Such a terminal “reinvention” wouldn’t make all of the problems now in the Energy Department’s bailiwick, such as cleaning up nuclear waste, go away. But it would get the government out of the energy business, put the research labs in the private sector, and transfer responsibility for the cleanup job to a new, more competent, pair of hands. And perhaps to someone less concerned about image than about performance.
