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Gibbs pushes back on reports of White House missteps in oil spill
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is strongly rebutting criticism of the administration’s oil spill response from staff on the presidential panel investigating the disaster.
“I do not think that the staff report reflects in many ways a lot of the context,” Gibbs said Thursday.
A staff “working paper” from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore drilling suggests the White House — in the early days of the spill — may have blocked disclosure of “worst case” estimates of the amount of oil flowing.
“There was never an effort to not put out the most accurate and timely information as soon as we had it,” Gibbs said.
The paper also criticizes the White House’s rollout in August of a report on the fate of spilled oil, claiming the administration painted an overly rosy picture of the amount of oil removed or dispersed.
Gibbs took pains to note that the findings were not endorsed by the bipartisan panel that President Obama created, but rather staff work meant to inform the commission.
“If you look at the report, these papers, they are preliminary, subject to change, do not necessarily reflect the views either of the commission as a whole or of any of its members,” Gibbs said in a briefing Thursday morning, and reiterated the point in an afternoon briefing.
He also addressed the specific findings in the staff paper. Perhaps the most politically explosive is the claim that in late April or early May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wanted to make public long-term, worst-case discharge models from BP’s blown-out well, but the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) denied the request.
“NOAA and OMB are working on ensuring that the commission takes into account the context around the report that's described . . . more accurately in what will ultimately be signed off on by the members of the commission, rather than just the staff working paper,” Gibbs said.
The commission is presenting a final report to the White House in January.
OMB yesterday noted that senior administration officials in early May had cited worst-case scenario figures of 100,000 barrels per day in media interviews.
Gibbs said the document in question in the staff report was not a flow rate analysis at all, but instead a shoreline impact analysis of how the oil spewing from the well could travel through waters. He said OMB felt that the initial NOAA report did not fully take into account oil recovery operations underway, and that it was sent back to incorporate that information and later released.
“OMB did not think that the modeling took into account what was going on, and asked them to take that into account in what is ultimately released,” Gibbs said.
More broadly, Gibbs said the administration was as candid as possible in releasing information about the spill that began with the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Initial federal and BP estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the well proved far too low, and reports by federal and outside scientists ultimately concluded that early projections of 5,000 barrels per day were 10 times too small.
The commission’s staff paper also critiqued the White House’s controversial August rollout of an “oil budget” that concluded about 75 percent of the oil had been burned, skimmed, captured, evaporated or dissolved, or dispersed.
The document came under attack for providing an overly rosy picture of the spill’s impact, and the paper specifically cited August 4 comments by White House energy adviser Carol Browner that, “The vast majority of the oil is gone.”
“[T]he Oil Budget was a rough operational tool, and its findings were neither as clear nor as reassuring as the initial rollout suggested,” the staff paper said.
But Gibbs said the administration was careful to put the findings in the proper context in a briefing that day with Browner and NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco. Gibbs said in a briefing later on Thursday that “Carol probably did hundreds of hours of interviews and may have misspoken once, which is a pretty darn good track record."
Overall, the staff paper says that estimates of the amounts of oil that was flowing from the blown-out well and later the amount of oil remaining in the Gulf “undermined public confidence in the federal government’s response to the spill.”
“By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of the summer, appearing to underestimate the amount of oil remaining in the Gulf, the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem,” the paper notes.
