Vice President Dick Cheney has prevailed in his refusal to hand over to Congress details of the energy task force meetings that framed President Bush's energy policy. The General Accounting Office this week issued a report concluding administration officials worked closely with petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical and natural gas industry representatives, but secrecy surrounding Cheney's task force made it impossible to ascertain the influence they had on the White House energy policy.
Congressional investigators wrote in the report that Cheney's "persistent denial of access" to records of the meetings "precluded GAO from fully achieving our objectives and substantially limited our analysis."
It's a rather Pyrrhic victory, however.
A comprehensive energy policy was one of President Bush's top priorities when he took office. Cheney's energy task force convened just 10 days after the president took office. In May 2001, the White House unveiled the president's National Energy Policy. Since then, however, the focus has been on the amount of influence energy-producing industries wielded over the process - not on implementing the president's policy. The White House-backed energy bill has languished in Congress. Unless a new push to pass it succeeds shortly after Labor Day, it's likely to stay mired through the coming election year.
If President Bush wanted to rally support for his energy policy, he should have opened the doors and windows and let the sun shine in on the energy task force. If the advice he and Cheney got from industry leaders and others was any good, it should bear close scrutiny. If it can't stand up to public scrutiny, then the advice probably wasn't very good. Since there's no good reason to cloak the origins of the energy policy in secrecy, it's only natural that secrecy breeds suspicion.
Amid this whole debate over the task force and how it did its work, we've had Enron and the electricity deregulation fiasco, natural gas shortages, refinery bottlenecks, high gas prices, upheaval in the utility industry and the largest blackout in U.S. history. America has no energy policy, just a few schemes to drill in wilderness and, for some of us, a lot of curiosity about who's going to be selling us electricity next week. Such concerns have short-circuited our joy over the vice president's separation-of-powers victory.
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