Obama Defends Handling of Oil Spill

WASHINGTON — Saying that he is “angry and frustrated” over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama on Thursday ordered work to be suspended on exploratory drilling in the gulf and cancelled or deferred some future wells around the country, as the head of the agency regulating offshore drilling resigned under pressure.

Addressing deepening public frustration and defending his handling of the five-week-old crisis, Mr. Obama acknowledged that his team had made several mistakes of judgment and approach, at one point even saying “I was wrong” to believe that oil companies were prepared for worst-case disasters as he moved forward with plans for expanded offshore drilling last month, before the disaster in the gulf, which was caused by an explosion on April 20 that destroyed a drilling rig leased by BP.

“In case you’re wondering who’s responsible, I take responsibility,” Mr. Obama said at a rare White House news conference. “It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen right away or the way I’d like it to happen. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to make mistakes. But there shouldn’t be any confusion here. The federal government is fully engaged and I’m fully engaged.”

In response to questioning by reporters, Mr. Obama listed several areas where he or his administration had made mistakes. For one, he said his administration should have moved more aggressively to clean up what he called a cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry, suggesting that the disaster might have been prevented if steps were taken sooner.

“Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough,” he said. “If they had been happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

But the president rejected criticism that he had not focused intently enough on the spill, now estimated to be the biggest in United States history, with millions of gallons of oil already released into the gulf. He said he thinks about the disaster every morning when he wakes up and every night when he goes to bed.

“Every day I see this leak continue, I am angry and frustrated as well,” the president told reporters in the East Room. He acknowledged that not every decision has been perfect and “we can always do better.” But he added: “Those who think that we were either slow in our response or lacked urgency don’t know the facts. This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred.”

Even his daughter, Malia, prods him on the matter, he said, recounting her popping her head into the bathroom while he was shaving in the morning to ask: “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”

The news conference came hours after the head of the Minerals Management Service, the agency that regulates offshore drilling, stepped down under pressure. S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, who took over as director of the agency last July, announced her resignation after being asked by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to relinquish her post, a government official said. While she might have stayed in the department in another position, she decided instead to resign, the official said.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama ordered the suspension of work on 33 exploratory wells currently being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico; a further six-month moratorium on new permits for deepwater oil and gas wells; a temporary halt to planned exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the coast of Alaska; the cancellation of a planned August lease sale in the western Gulf of Mexico; and the cancellation of a proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia. Environmentalists who had opposed the Alaska and Virginia projects hailed the decisions.

Mr. Obama said further moves will be made to strengthen oversight of the drilling industry and enhance safety as a commission he is appointing opens its own six-month inquiry. The commission will be led by former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, and by William K. Reilly, who was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President Bush.

The moves to rein in drilling were a marked turnaround for Mr. Obama. Just a few weeks before the disaster on the gulf rig, known as the Deepwater Horizon, Mr. Obama proposed an expansion of offshore oil exploration as a response to the nation’s continuing need for new energy sources. But the policy change reflects the volatile and rapidly shifting political environment and Mr. Obama’s search for ways to demonstrate leadership as efforts to cope with the spill have seemed to falter.

Ms. Birnbaum’s resignation came after weeks of questions about whether she was up to the task of remaking the Minerals Management Service, an agency widely recognized as one of the most dysfunctional in government.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, she was described by friends as smart, tenacious, persistent and tough, but she has also been criticized for doing almost nothing to fix problems that have plagued the agency for more than a decade. She rarely visited the agency’s far-flung offices, and critics said the same agency managers who ignored or suppressed scientists’ concerns about safety and environmental risks in the past were still doing the same things under her.

In a statement, Ms. Birnbaum said, “I’m hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a House subcommittee on Thursday that Ms. Birnbaum chose to step down. “She did it on her own terms, in her own volition,” Mr. Salazar said. “But I will say this about Liz Birnbaum: She is a strong and very effective person” who “helped us in moving forward in addressing what was a very broken system that we found when I came into the Department of Interior.”

Mr. Obama said he only learned about Ms. Birnbaum’s resignation Thursday morning and did not know whether she had been forced out. According to a government official briefed on the matter, Mr. Salazar asked Ms. Birnbaum to leave her position as director of the agency, although it was not clear whether she would have another position as he reorganizes the regulatory structure. At that point, she decided to resign altogether, the official said.

After the news conference on Thursday, Mr. Obama planned to fly to Louisiana on Friday to look more closely into the efforts being made to counter the leak, his second trip to the region since the explosion. Critics who call the disaster Mr. Obama’s Hurricane Katrina point out that President George W. Bush traveled to the region more frequently in the early weeks after the hurricane that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Karl Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff during Hurricane Katrina, argued the case in his Wall Street Journal column on Thursday morning. “Could this be Mr. Obama’s Katrina? It could be even worse,” he wrote. Mr. Rove recalled Mr. Obama’s criticism of Mr. Bush’s handling of the hurricane and tried to throw it back at him. “Mr. Obama’s failure to lead in cleaning up the spill could lead voters to echo his complaint in Katrina’s aftermath: ‘I wish that the federal government had been up to the task.’ ”

Brushing off the comparisons, Mr. Obama said the government has made “the largest effort of its kind in U.S. history” to the oil leak, dispatching 20,000 people, 1,300 vessels and 3 million feet of boom to the region to contain and clean up the spill.

“We are relying on every resource and every idea, every expert and every bit of technology to work to stop it,” the president said. “We will take ideas from anywhere but we are going to stop it. And I know that doesn’t lessen the enormous sense of anger and frustration felt by people on the Gulf and so many Americans.”

He disputed those who argue that the federal government should take over the response to the spill, saying the government does oversee it already. “Make no mistake, BP is operating at our direction,” he said. “Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance.”

How sweeping the president’s new orders will be remains to be seen. After he ordered his initial moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers were granted, according to records.

Since the April 20 explosion, the records show, federal regulators granted at least 19 environmental waivers for Gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits. The administration has said that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells, not to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.

A poll released by CBS News this week underscored the growing public impatience with the administration’s handling of the crisis. Forty-five percent of those surveyed disapproved of the way the administration has responded to the oil spill, compared with 35 percent who approved. Fully 70 percent disapproved of BP’s handling of the situation.

At the same time, support for offshore drilling has cratered. While 64 percent favored increased drilling in 2008, just 45 percent do now, according to CBS, while those who say the risks are too great increased from 28 percent two years ago to 46 percent.

Shell Oil had been hoping to begin a controversial exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would put on hold. Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was frustrated because the decision “will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation’s energy needs.”

“The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore, but Shell has updated its plans at the administration’s request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the Gulf spill,” Mr. Begich said in a statement. “They make an effective case that we can safely explore for oil and gas this summer in the Arctic.”

In his statement, Mr. Begich argued that the administration’s decision would cost Alaska jobs and money, and force the country “to export more dollars and import more oil from some unfriendly places, jeopardizing our economic and national security.”