Three days before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar testified before the committee on March 3, the agency's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement issued the first deepwater permit since the Macondo disaster and subsequent drilling moratorium.

In the week before BOEM Director Michael Bromwich addressed the committee on Wednesday, regulators announced the fifth and sixth drilling permits to meet the new offshore safety standards.

"Every time that we schedule a hearing or have a press conference, new permits are issued," Hastings said Wednesday to start the hearing on BOEM's budget request. "I just wonder if we should maybe have more committee hearings and press conferences."

Bromwich didn't laugh along with Hastings and other GOP legislators.

"The fact is, Mr. Chairman, that deepwater permits were really not eligible to be granted until industry had demonstrated subsea containment abilities," Bromwich said. "That did not happen until February 17 of this year. So people who count from the lifting of the moratorium are counting from the wrong date.

"So within 11 days of that ability being demonstrated, we granted the first permit," he went on. "I know that Secretary Salazar testified shortly thereafter. But the fact was the industry was not ready before February 17."

Bromwich said politics plays no part in permitting.

"I exercise no control. Secretary Salazar exercises no control," he said. "Those are done by our drilling engineers in the Gulf of Mexico regional office. We receive the information so that we're ready for it, but we don't direct them when to issue."

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