House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) yesterday said he is prepared to take additional steps to force the Interior Department's compliance with his committee's investigation into the editing of a report on the Deepwater Horizon disaster that made it appear that a panel of independent scientists supported a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a letter yesterday, Hastings accused Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of violating a subpoena his committee issued earlier this month seeking documents and correspondence associated with the agency's 30-day safety report and a subsequent inspector general probe into its editing (Greenwire, April 3).

"In failing to comply with the subpoena, the department's official response does not live up to your publicly stated pledge of doing 'everything we can to cooperate' and similarly fails to uphold President Obama's pledge of unprecedented transparency by his administration," Hastings wrote. "Absent a valid claim of executive privilege for these documents, the department has a duty to fully and promptly comply with the duly authorized and issued subpoena."

He added that he is prepared to initiate further action if the agency continues to flout the subpoena.

The subpoena asked for all documents created, sent or received by current or former Interior officials Steve Black, Neal Kemkar, Mary Katherine Ishee, David Hayes and Tom Strickland in the two months following April 26, 2010, involving the "development, editing, review, issuance, response, or reaction to" the agency's report on the Deepwater Horizon spill, which recommended the six-month halt in offshore drilling.

It also seeks more than a dozen documents that Interior provided to acting Inspector General Mary Kendall but asked to be kept from the public on concerns the documents could raise confidentiality issues with the executive branch.

Interior on April 10 called the subpoena "unnecessary and precipitous" but provided 164 pages of correspondence and pledged to provide additional documents on the report later that week (Greenwire, April 11).

The committee has not released the new documents, nor has it made available a file Interior provided last October containing 112 documents and 919 pages of emails between Black, who is counselor to Salazar; Kemkar, who is an agency employee on detail to the Council on Environmental Quality; and the scientists who conducted a peer review on the Interior safety report.

Hastings told E&E Daily he was scheduled to review Kendall's response to a separate subpoena yesterday afternoon. The committee subpoenaed Kendall's office shortly after receiving Interior's response (Greenwire, April 12).

Kendall's report in late 2010 concluded that late-night edits to the report by the White House had erroneously implied a group of independent scientists supported the proposed drilling ban, though they never endorsed it (Greenwire, Nov. 10, 2010). Interior issued a quick public apology to the scientists, and the report said there was no clear evidence of an intent to mislead the public.

In a February letter to the committee, Interior said that, of the 13 documents, six are copies of the same attachments to the 2010 report for which the agency provided an index last August and three were reviewed by committee staff at the agency.

The agency said it had provided an index of the remaining seven documents but argued they "were not related to the committee's articulated interest concerning how the peer review was described in the executive summary to the ... report."

Hastings said he is tired of excuses.

"If the department has nothing to hide, then it should stop hiding these documents and its decisions from appropriate congressional oversight," he said.