Sen. David Vitter told the White House Friday he was opposing the nomination of Mary Kendall to be the Interior Department’s inspector general. He argued she cannot be trusted because, as the department’s acting inspector general, he says she refused to fully investigate allegations that department officials tampered with a report used to justify shutting down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I will strenuously object to any consideration of her nomination, and request that you immediately withdraw it and instead put forward a nominee who can be confirmed by the Senate and hit the ground running,” the Louisiana Republican said in a letter to President Obama. He is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has oversight of the department.
A representative for the Interior Department could not be reached for comment.
Vitter’s opposition to Kendall involves an incident in May 2010 involving the cleanup of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The department released a report that month assessing the spill’s damage and calling for a six-month moratorium on all Gulf drilling.
The moratorium was deeply unpopular in Gulf States, where offshore drilling is a major industry. Vitter and others argued at the time there was no need to shut down drilling rigs unconnected to the BP spill.
The Interior Department justified the decision by saying the report had been “peer-reviewed” by “experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” However, seven of the scientists identified in the report publicly disputed the department’s claims. They said they had not supported a moratorium and their recommendations were rewritten to imply that they had.
In a June 2010 letter, they said a drilling moratorium “is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill.”
They also accused then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of having political motives. “The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions,” the seven scientists wrote.
Lawmakers, including Vitter, demanded an investigation. The senator argues now that the ban cost the region 13,000 jobs, $800 million in lost wages and $155 million in state and local tax revenue.
A November 2010 report by Kendall, who was acting inspector general at the time, agreed the May 2010 report misstated the scientists’ recommendations but cited comments from Interior officials that it was an inadvertent mistake.
“All [Interior] officials interviewed stated that it was never their intention to imply the moratorium was peer reviewed by the experts, but rather rushed editing of the executive summary by [the Department of Interior] and the White House resulted in this implication,” Kendall’s report said.
Vitter has rejected that conclusion. The senator said in his letter Friday that under Kendall the inspector general’s office then “ceased to fulfill its responsibilities as an independent investigative entity” and instead obstructed congressional investigations into the matter by refusing to comply with subpoenas.
