Ex-Interior drilling chief knocks House GOP for ‘grandstanding’

Michael Bromwich, who led the overhaul of the Interior Department’s troubled offshore drilling branch, was never especially shy about trading blows with House Republicans.

And now, back in the private sector, he’s really not pulling punches. Bromwich used a short National Journal commentary Tuesday to attack what he alleges are GOP efforts to weaken drilling safety oversight that was beefed up after the 2010 BP oil spill.

Here’s Bromwich on the energy bills that the GOP-led House has advanced:

These have included proposing to set tight and unreasonable deadlines for approving offshore oil and gas exploration plans and drilling permits, and a bill that would have deleted “Environmental Enforcement” from the name of the newly-formed “Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.” In short, the legislative reaction, at least in the House, to a massive oil spill that highlighted the weaknesses in offshore regulation was to work to undo the long overdue reforms that were implemented in its wake.

“These are not serious efforts to deal with real problems through the development of a sound and balanced energy policy; they constitute political grandstanding,” added Bromwich, who started a consulting company called The Bromwich Group after leaving Interior at the end of 2011. He’s also a partner at Goodwin Procter.

The column doesn’t mention Republicans specifically. However, the bills Bromwich refers to are GOP-led measures steered through the Republican-controlled House.

His criticism Tuesday is part of a National Journal collection of outside commentary on the political and policy ramifications of falling gasoline prices.

“Energy policy is currently stuck in the mud, and unfortunately it will take more than declining gas prices to change that reality,” writes Bromwich, an attorney and former Justice Department official who joined Interior in the months after the BP spill began in 2010.