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THE FED PAGE
Obama plans to cut Coast Guard center
Critics say coordination team is essential for readiness for crises
by Spencer S. Hsu
Three months before the mas- sive BP oil spill erupted in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama ad- ministration proposed downsiz- ing the Coast Guard national co- ordination center for oil spill re- sponses, prompting its senior officers to warn that the agency’s readiness for catastrophic events would be weakened. That proposal is feeding a mounting debate over whether the federal government is able to regulate deep-sea oil extraction. Defense analysts and retired agency leaders question whether the Coast Guard — which shares oversight of offshore drilling with the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service — has the expertise and resources to keep pace with industry ad- vances.
Accidents happen, “but what
you’re seeing here is the govern- ment is not properly set up to deal with this kind of issue,” said Robbin Laird, a defense consul- tant who has worked on Coast Guard issues. “The idea that you would even think about getting rid of catastrophic environmen- tal spill equipment or expertise at the Department of Homeland Security, are you kidding me?” “Cutting a strike team is nuts,” said Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander and now president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington think tank. “Whether it’s an acci- dent of man or an act of terror- ism, it requires almost the exact same skill set to clean it up.” President Obama’s $10.1 bil- lion spending plan for the Coast Guard would scale back funding and active-duty personnel by 3 percent. As part of a proposal to cut 1,100 military personnel, it would decommission the Nation- al Strike Force Coordination Center in Elizabeth City, N.C.,
and reorganize parts of it else- where. The center serves as the na- tional command for the Coast Guard activity responsible for sending technical experts and specialized equipment such as pumps and chemical dispersant monitors to support on-scene commanders. Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that the proposal will streamline opera- tions and that the staffing and equipment of three other strike teams that work with the center will not be reduced. The coordi- nation center’s “duties will be transferred to other Coast Guard offices, allowing redundant lo- gistical and administrative posi- tions to be eliminated,” he said in an e-mail. In a February interview on
Laird’s Web site, Second Line of Defense, the National Strike Force’s executive officer said that although federal law requires in- dustries to be able to respond to spills and to pay for them, it is the Coast Guard that inspects whether they can meet their obli- gation. The Coast Guard also keeps databases of cleanup com-
panies, storage sites and equip- ment. “The elimination of the na- tional command element could well lead to a reduction in core competencies in capabilities needed in a crisis,” said Cmdr. Ti- na Cutter. The absence of large spills in recent years has “de- graded” the skills of responders, making it more critical to main- tain technical experts, particu- larly in catastrophes, she said. Industry and former Coast Guard officials say that private- sector research into spills has not kept pace with drilling ad- vances and that the government also has struggled to keep pace. One improvement, said James
M. Loy, Coast Guard comman- dant from 1998 to 2002 and now senior counselor at the Cohen Group, is the just-announced ex- pansion of the Coast Guard’s role in approving drilling and spill re- sponse plans. Also, Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed requiring inspections of blowout preventers and inde- pendent certification of industry drilling systems.
As the country considers how
to beef up response require- ments, the Coast Guard also will probably oversee the rise of pri- vate cleanup firms. Ken Wells, president of the Offshore Marine Service Association, which rep- resents U.S.-flagged vessels that support drilling rigs, said the Coast Guard should invest in people, not materials. “It’s intel- lectual capital rather than equip- ment,” Wells said. “The govern- ment doesn’t own things very well.” The wider dilemma for the Coast Guard is how to manage expanded responsibilities along with its traditional duties at a time of shrinking budgets. In a statement, Rep. Hal Rog- ers (R-Kent.), ranking Republi- can on the House Appropriations homeland security subcommit- tee, said, “If we’re going to rely on the Coast Guard to secure our borders, stop Caribbean drug traffickers, respond to earth- quakes, counter terrorist threats, and stop one of the largest oil spills in American history, we’d had better resource these front- line agencies appropriately.”
hsus@washpost.com
The oil spill point man
Allen elicits praise and retires. Not a bad week.
government’s response to the Gulf Coast oil spill. Allen faced off with White
I
CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thad W. Allen, now retired from the Coast Guard, faced off with reporters over the oil spill.
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House reporters on Monday to try to rebut criticism of the Obama administration’s response to the disaster. On Tuesday he retired from the Coast Guard, and on Thursday he got five shout-outs from President Obama during his news conference. The Tucson native is the son of
a retired Coast Guard chief petty officer and graduated in 1971
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responding to such disasters, as the national incident commander. And if he orders BP to do something to respond to this disaster, they’re legally bound to do it.” “From Thad Allen, our national incident coordinator, through the most junior member of the Coast Guard or the undersecretary of NOAA, or any of the agencies under my charge, they understand this is the single most important thing that we have to get right.” “They [BP] do so under our supervision, and any major decision that they make has to be done under the approval of Thad Allen, the national incident coordinator. So this notion that somehow the federal government is sitting on the sidelines and for the last three or four or five weeks we’ve just been letting BP make a whole bunch of decisions is simply not true.” “ . . . you’ve got the federal government directly overseeing what BP is doing and Thad Allen is giving authorization when finally we feel comfortable that the risks of attempting a top kill, for example, are — are sufficiently reduced that it needs to be tried.” “ . . . right now, Thad Allen is down there because I think it is his view that some of the allocation of boom or other efforts to protect shorelines hasn’t been as nimble as it needs to be. And he’s said so publicly. And so he will be making sure that in fact the resources to protect the shorelines are there immediately.”
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t’s been an especially big week for Adm. Thad W. Allen, who’s spent more than a month wrestling with the federal
from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (where he was a linebacker on the Coast Guard Academy Bears). George W. Bush named him Coast Guard commandant in 2006, putting him in charge of the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security, with almost 90,000 active-duty guardsmen, civilian staffers, reservists and volunteer auxiliarists. Allen received national
attention in 2005 when Bush recalled then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael D. Brown to Washington and put the then-vice admiral in charge of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. At the time, Bush administration officials described Allen as “an action-oriented guy.” Obama cited Allen’s Gulf Coast
experiences when he tapped him to lead the federal response to the oil spill in April. Obama also used Allen as a verbal wingman during Thursday’s exchange with reporters:
FRIDAY,MAY 28, 2010
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and several colleagues say the brochure is a “gross misuse of taxpayer funds.”
New law comes
by David S. Hilzenrath
As the secretary of health and human services explains it, the government has an obligation to spread the word about the new health-care law. To that end, the department spent millions of dol- lars printing a glossy brochure and mailing it this week to 40 mil- lion Medicare beneficiaries de- tailing what Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called “the facts.” Among the facts: There are “Improvements in
Medicare You Will See Right Away.” There are “Improvements in Medicare You Will See Soon.” There are “Improvements Beyond Medicare That You and Your Fam- ily Can Count On.” And that’s not all: These improvements “will provide you and your family greater savings and increased quality health care.” Not surprisingly, Republicans see it differently. In Washington’s political hothouse, one person’s recitation of the facts is another’s “gross misuse of taxpayer funds to provide biased information for political purposes.” That’s the way Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and several colleagues put it. On the House side, senior Repub- licans on the Ways and Means Committee have called for an in- vestigation, saying the brochure violates a legal ban on govern- ment propaganda. The bitter year-long battle over health-care legislation has be- come an inch-by-inch, word-by- word war for public opinion in which features of the legislation are being trumpeted, spun, counter-spun, and spat upon. It’s a contest in which no boast goes unanswered, and no sign of prog- ress is too small to ballyhoo. On Thursday, Sebelius held a
news conference to issue another progress report on implementa- tion of the health-care law. The news: The first $250 rebate checks for Medicare beneficiaries caught in the so-called prescrip- tion drug “doughnut hole” will go out June 10, five days earlier than planned. What voters ultimately con- clude could help determine the outcome of the fall elections and the balance of power in Congress. Sebelius publicized the bro- chure at a news conference Wednesday with the House’s top Democrats, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
“One of our top jobs is to clear up confusion and correct misin- formation about health reform. This brochure . . . is a good place to start,” Pelosi said. “At the Department of Health
and Human Services, it’s our re- sponsibility to get the word to seniors about what the facts are involving this critical benefit pro- gram,” Sebelius added. The brochure was prepared by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency within HHS, said Marilyn B. Tavenner, the acting adminis- trator of CMS. Sebelius was in- volved and the White House was consulted, Tavenner said. It was paid for out of the budget for Medicare beneficiary informa- tion and outreach, she said. CMS spokesman Peter Ashkenaz said the brochure was mailed to 40 million households at a cost of 45 cents each. That adds up to $18,000,000.
Republicans disputed one as-
sertion after another. The bro- chure says the law makes “Im- provements to Medicare Advan-
with a brochure
Administration says mailing informs public; GOP calls it propaganda
tage,” a program through which beneficiaries can voluntarily en- roll in private health insurance plans. Not so, wrote Rep. Dave Camp (Mich.) and Wally Herger (Calif.), senior Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee. In a letter to the Government Ac- countability Office, a federal watchdog, they noted that the new health-care law reduces funding for Medicare Advantage by $206 billion over 10 years, and that the chief actuary at CMS has predicted that the cuts will result in “less generous benefit packag- es.”
The brochure says that what’s
being cut from Medicare Advan- tage are overpayments to insur- ance companies. The Ways and Means Repub- licans also challenged the asser- tion that the law will improve ac- cess to care. They cited a state- ment by the CMS actuary that some health-care providers might stop participating in Medicare, “possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.” In addition, the Republicans
said it was a misuse of Medicare funds for the brochure to discuss provisions that have nothing to do with Medicare, such as allow- ing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until they turn 26. Tavenner, the Medi- care official, countered that Medi- care beneficiaries often help edu- cate their families and friends. In a letter to Sebelius on Thurs-
day, McConnell and seven other Senate Republicans accused HHS of following a double standard. They noted that last year the de- partment ordered insurance com- panies that do business with Medicare to stop telling custom- ers the proposed legislation would jeopardize their benefits. (Insurers were exhorting custom- ers to rise up against the bill.) There is a long history of one
party accusing the other of engag- ing in taxpayer-funded propagan- da, and not too long ago the shoe was on the other foot. In 2004, Democrats com- plained to the GAO about a Bush administration flier promoting a new Medicare prescription drug benefit. In an echo of the current dispute, the flier said a 2003 law “preserves and strengthens the current Medicare program.” In the 2004 case, the GAO said
the material distributed by HHS had “notable omissions and other weaknesses” — for example, no mention that beneficiaries would be charged certain fees, or that the new drug benefit would great- ly widen a gap in Medicare fund- ing. However, the GAO concluded that the flier was not illegal. The ban on government propa- ganda “does not bar materials that may have some political con- tent or express support for a par- ticular view,” then-GAO general counsel Anthony H. Gamboa wrote in the 2004 legal opinion. “[W]e have historically afforded agencies wide discretion in their informational activities,” he said. Federal law prohibits the use of congressionally appropriated funds for publicity or propagan- da. The GAO has interpreted that to mean three things: touting the importance of a government agency, engaging in activities that serve a purely partisan purpose, or misleading the public as to the source of the information. The GAO found that HHS crossed the line in another 2004 case when it distributed scripts and video segments for television stations to plug into newscasts. The videos promoted the pre- scription drug benefit and gave the appearance of being news sto- ries. One concluded with the nar- rator saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”
hilzenrathd@washpost.com
Prince George’s couldn’t compete on GSA leases, lawmaker says. B3
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