Washington (Platts)--17May2007

Top Republicans on the US House Government and Oversight Committee want
Chairman Henry Waxman to find time on the panel's schedule to investigate
glitches in the Minerals Management Service's oil and natural gas leasing
program.

     Representatives Tom Davis, the ranking member of the committee, and
Darrell Issa, who holds the same post on the Domestic Policy Subcommittee,
made their request in a letter to Waxman Wednesday.

     Waxman, Democrat-California, has focused his attention on a range of
issues since he took over the panel in January, grilling government
contractors, officials, and executive branch members on everything from Iraq
war contracting to Hurricane Katrina relief. But Republicans say he has
overlooked MMS and what they call its "culture of mismanagement, ethical
lapses and cover-ups" in favor of more political topics.

     Davis,  Republican-Virginia, who chaired the committee in the last
Congress, held a series of hearings which focused on MMS, and in particular on
the leases it signed in the late 1990s that omitted price thresholds that
would trigger royalty payments. He and Issa, Republican-California, grilled
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on whether the errors might have been
deliberate attempts by Interior personnel to advantage oil companies.

     Issa has been a critic of MMS Director Johnnie Burton, who resigned
this month, and has said if she had acted to correct these errors when they
first came to her attention in 2004, it would have saved taxpayers billions
of dollars in lost royalties.

     Waxman's chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, said oversight of MMS is a
bipartisan issue, and that the chairman and Davis wrote Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales in December, asking him to review a legal analysis that
concluded that MMS did not have the legal authority to authorize those
leases, and the federal government therefore had recourse to recoup the
losses. 

     No hearings are scheduled on the issue, Schiliro said, but the committee
is still looking into it. One concern, he said, would be not to duplicate the
investigations Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall, Democrat-West Virginia,
conducted this spring. Rahall's panel has taken a detailed look at MMS'
procedures and royalty enforcement.