Last Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney gave a tutorial on President Obama’s response to political embarrassment.
Carney blamed “career professionals” at the Department of Energy for giving $535 million of taxpayer money to Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar energy company.
Carney’s comments tended to insulate President Obama, and even Obama’s appointed Energy Secretary Steven Chu, from responsibility for the loan debacle.
“Secretary Chu does have the president’s full confidence [as head of the Energy Department],” Carney said. “Ultimately, the head of that department is responsible for [the loan],” he continued, “but let’s be clear, there were numerous people involved who were career professionals and work on those kinds of issues every day.”
Carney’s benignant attitude towards “career professionals” – implicitly capable people who made an unfortunate mistake – at the Energy Department contrasts with the party line regarding last year’s energy sector embarrassment, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
As oil poured into the Gulf, Obama directed attention to what he termed a “cozy relationship” between the oil industry and federal regulators. Indeed, one regulator said of his colleagues in 2010 that “we’re all oil industry.”
Only a year into Obama’s presidency, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., attacked former President George W. Bush, blaming him for the regulatory failure in the Deepwater case, thanks to his supposedly “burrowed-in” political appointees.
Biographical information of the Minerals and Management Service officials responsible for Deepwater Horizon undercuts Pelosi’s claim. Most of the federal employees involved had started working with the agency decades earlier.
Bush appointed none of the regulators, although one had received a promotion to his position during Bush’s presidency.
Obama has extended the “cozy relationship” argument throughout this year, as when often charging Republicans with wanting to “let corporations to write their own rules,” but he seems unconcerned over potential conflicts of interest between his administration and his favored green energy industry.
For instance, a major fundraiser for Obama’s campaign, George Kaiser, owned a large financial interest in Solyndra LLC. Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave the company a $535 million loan guarantee – and restructured that loan so that Solyndra would repay private investors before repaying the taxpayer dollars – even though officials had warned that the company appeared financially insecure.
Despite that poor track record, Chu then gave a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar of Solar Reserve, another company backed by Kaiser. Moreover, Solar Reserve receives financial support from a company that includes Ronald Pelosi – Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law – among its executives.
Carney’s defense of Obama and Chu at the expense of the “career professionals” reveals the inherent danger of expanding the power of the bureaucratic state.
The measures advocated may have merit, in some cases, but tend to put “too much discretionary power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats,” to quote Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
The bureaucrats’ failure in giving out the Solyndra loan guarantee demonstrates their fallibility. President Obama’s desire to continue the loan program reveals his folly.
Obama offers the bureaucratic state as a palliative to social ills and a guard against corporations who might disregard the public good. But when the bureaucrats cost the public half a billion dollars, Obama does not accept responsibility.
Instead, he shifts blame to the “career professionals” who administered the loan, while expressing “full confidence” in the ability of the political appointees he selected to manage the expanding bureaucratic apparatus.
Obama’s treatment of energy industry bureaucrats reveals the one constant in his attitude towards bureaucracy and government power: When something goes wrong, he wants you to know that he’s not responsible.
