The American people deserve genuine answers on the Gulf disaster. Regrettably, Obama’s politicized commission is already taking us in the wrong direction.

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This week, President Barack Obama’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission began hearings in New Orleans to discuss the Gulf accident and the necessary response. 

Rather than focusing on unbiased inquiry and saving American jobs, unfortunately, the commission and Obama Administration hastily and irrationally insist upon their offshore drilling moratorium.  As a recent Washington Post article noted, during the hearing, “the commission members asked mostly broad questions that elicited little new information.”  The fact that the commission is ill-equipped to be leading this effort quickly became the prevailing theme.
 
Despite hearing from a list of witnesses that even a temporary hold on drilling will cripple the Gulf economy, the commission still opted to send jobs abroad.  As documented by Bryan Walsh in a recent TIME article, nearly 125,000 jobs in Louisiana could be lost and “energy—in all its facets—contributes about $65 billion to Louisiana's $210 billion economy, compared to about $10 billion for fishing and tourism.”

A better course would have been securing a commission with bipartisan expertise and interests.  Unfortunately, Obama’s commission consists entirely of strong anti-drilling ideologues. 

Sadly, that isn’t even the worst of the problem. The commission also lacks the technical expertise needed for adequate evaluations of industry practices, and many of the members are transparent environmental activists.  The commission claims to be investigating the disaster’s root causes, but how can this happen in the absence of any actual engineering experts?  Their purported efforts toward better safety standards and regulations will prove meaningless without in-depth knowledge of the petroleum industry.

The Heritage Foundation addresses the lack of scientific expertise in a blog post, highlighting the “obvious biases of a majority of its members who have either stated publicly their opposition to drilling, or are members of organizations that oppose offshore drilling.  There is only one member with any engineering background at all, although her specialties are physics and optics.”

Tragically, most commission members’ backgrounds are rather irrelevant when it comes to addressing questions involving offshore drilling.  It is of grave importance that the commission fully understand what went wrong on BP’s Horizon facility.  With Obama’s hyper-politicized commission, however, it is easy to predict that the outcome of their findings will be skewed.  Witnesses and experts can testify until they’re blue in the face, but ultimate authority ultimately lies in the hands of the committee. 

If we’re going to address the BP disaster, restore trust in the government and move forward to prevent future disasters, true operational expertise is critically necessary.  Not only must we avoid political biases, but we must focus on quickly ascertaining ways to safely enhance offshore drilling instead of driving even more jobs overseas. 

The American people deserve genuine answers on the Gulf disaster.  Regrettably, Obama’s politicized commission is already taking us in the wrong direction.