In the interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Jindal talked about President Obama’s May visit to Louisiana to examine the damage from the oil spill.

“I thought he’d be mad about the oil, I thought he’d be worried about the impact on our wetlands, or the lack of boom and resources. He’s mad about a routine letter we have sent to the agricultural department about food stamps,” Jindal said. “A second example. They literally shut down vacuum barges that are picking up thousands of gallons of oil in the water to count the number of life jackets and fire extinguishers. It just seemed like they were disconnected from the reality on the ground.”

He then touted his response to the spill.

“The federal government didn’t want to do vacuum barges. I ordered the National Guard to build a couple of prototypes. First one literally was a truck, the kind of truck you use to clean porta potties, same kind of technology” he said. “And it worked. And all of a sudden the federal government authorized dozens of those. We had the National Guard out there building land bridges to block the oil from coming into the wetlands. … The reality is, it worked. And the reality is, it prevented that oil from getting into the wetlands 15 to 20 miles away.”

Jindal also criticized the Obama administration’s response to the spill in his interview with the Times-Picayune.

He said he and his staff concluded the best way to prod the federal government into action was to take to the airwaves and complain.

“There was a pattern during the oil spill,” Jindal told the paper. “If the media discovered it, all of a sudden we’d get response from the White House.”