The Oil Spill Shows the Dangers of a Big Bureaucracy

The bureaucracy didn't start the oil spill, but based on their actions I'm beginning to think they don't want to end it either.  From Dick Morris in The Hill:

It's one thing to say that Obama's administration showed ineptitude and mismanagement in its handling of the Gulf oil spill. It is quite another to grasp the situation up close, as I did during a recent visit to Alabama.

According to state disaster relief officials, Alabama conceived a plan -- early on -- to erect huge booms offshore to shield the approximately 200 miles of the state's coastline from oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough huge, heavy booms -- some weighing tons and seven meters high -- to guard their coast.

But...no sooner were the booms in place than the Coast Guard, perhaps under pressure from the public comments of James Carville, uprooted them and moved them to guard the Louisiana coastline instead.

So Alabama decided on a backup plan. It would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the beaches.

But...the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan, saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.

So Alabama -- ever resourceful -- decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches in person, scooping up oil that had washed ashore.

But...OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) refused to allow them to work more than 20 minutes out of every hour and required an hourlong break after 40 minutes of work, so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.

The short answer is that every agency -- each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda -- was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill, with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries and recreational facilities.

Where was the president? Why did he not intervene in these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a focus on the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?

According to Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, the administration's "lack of ability has become transparent" in its handling of the oil spill. He notes that one stellar exception has been Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, without whom, he says, nothing whatever would have gotten done.

Eventually, the state stopped listening to federal agencies and just has gone ahead and given funds directly to the local folks fighting the spill rather than paying attention to the directives of the Unified Command.

There's more at the link.

We've managed to staff these federal bureaucracies with activists who can't see beyond the focus of their agency, and thus many stupid decisions such as those mentioned above are made.  From the beginning of this thing there needed to be a central clearinghouse - a supreme commander if you will - who had the power to overrule individual agencies and do whatever had to be done to protect the coastal waters and beaches, even if it meant the loss of certain sea life along the way.  How many more turtles will die because their beaches will be fouled with oil that might have been kept offshore?

The Obama administration has badly bungled this thing and have proven once again that fallacy that big government is better.