Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) today said Congress probably could have stopped last summer's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had lawmakers done a better job of oversight.

Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made his comments at today's unveiling of the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) biennial "High Risk" list, which for the first time included the Department of the Interior's management of the nation's oil and gas resources among the 30 troubled federal programs it cited (Greenwire, Feb. 16).

"I would like to take this opportunity to be a little apologetic," Issa said. "Six years ago, when I was subcommittee chairman on Government Oversight, we had live testimony repeatedly by various people in the Department of the Interior ... on just how broken the system at [the now-defunct Minerals Management Service] was."

Issa said that if Congress had done a better job in 2005 on its oversight of MMS, "we would clearly have had an impact on what happened in the Gulf and probably would have stopped it, because the blowout preventers that failed in fact were determined to be questionable in 2003."

It was a bold statement and one that Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) -- who served on the oversight panel in 2005 and is currently the ranking Democrat on the committee -- said he wasn't sure he'd agree with.

Asked if Issa had gone too far in blaming Congress for the Gulf disaster, Cummings said, "I don't know."

GAO Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who praised Issa's past efforts to shed light on oil and gas management issues at Interior, said he would not second-guess the congressman's assessment of where the blame lies for the spill. But he quickly added that he wasn't personally involved during that period of time, "so I really don't have a basis for commenting otherwise."

Though Issa was full of praise for the GAO in its effort to create a blueprint for congressional oversight with its high risk list, he questioned today why it took a national disaster to get Interior's oil and gas management program included.

"In 2006, the Department of the Interior's own Inspector General Earl Devaney told the Oversight Committee that 'short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior,'" Issa said in a statement earlier today. "It's better late than never, but it shouldn't have taken the worst ecological disaster in history for GAO to place this program onto the high risk list."

Dodaro said that while GAO takes into account several qualitative and quantitative factors when it comes to creating its list, ultimately it's up to the agency's professional judgment on what programs to add.

"With regard to the Interior program, there could be questions about exactly when we should have put that on the list, but our view was that we needed to understand better the full range of problems over there," Dodaro said. But "the main point I'd emphasize right now is ... that it's on the list, and the reason we put it on the list is because it raises visibility and there's a greater likelihood that the problems will be resolved over a period of time."