American Energy. Walter A. Rosenbaum
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crises” of the 1970s, created by the sudden blockade of oil exports to America by Middle Eastern states. The resulting domestic petroleum shortfall badly disrupted the American economy, inspired consumer alarm, and rapidly elevated gasoline prices, compelling the federal government to hurriedly initiate new energy price controls, production regulations, and even some energy rationing. But few of these rapid policy lurches survived beyond the mid-1980s.
Governing Energy: Federal Institutions
The federal government dominates the institutional governance of energy. In addition to the White House, Congress, and the federal courts, at least eighteen other federal agencies are directly involved in more than 160 energy-related programs. These activities span the entire range of energy-related activities and often involve institutions that might seem unrelated to energy issues (such as the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service). The federal government in 2012 collected about $12 billion from energy-related programs including, especially, fees and royalties from development of federal energy resources and more than $35 billion in excise taxes on gasoline and other fuels.19
The White House. Since 1976, every president has included special advisors on energy and related policies within the White House staff. Beginning with George W. Bush in 2000, a rising sense of urgency about energy affairs has prompted the White House to initiate more aggressive efforts to coordinate energy policy within the executive branch with new White House staff arrangements. President Obama attempted the most ambitious of these innovations by initially creating, then abolishing, within the White House staff the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy directed by an “Energy Czar,” former EPA administrator Carol Browner, who reported directly to the President.a
a Browner’s job was to promote “integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state, and local governments; and partnership with the private sector” in energy-related issues. In January 2011, however, Browner resigned as energy czarina, and the position was eliminated, suggesting that Obama, like his predecessors, had found energy planning too contentious politically to sustain a White House priority.
Regardless of who is president and what priority may be given to energy policy, the president quickly discovers that, despite his lofty title as “chief executive,” leading the large, persistently contentious, and extremely competitive federal energy departments and agencies, each preoccupied with its own mission and constituency, is a formidable and often frustrating task. The last comprehensive national energy plan, proposed by President George W. Bush in 2003, would have required coordination among twenty-nine different program activities, implemented by eleven different agencies—six agencies, for instance, were involved in programs relating to the impact of energy development and use of the environment.20 Such coordination is always difficult and contentious.
Congress. In formulating national energy policy, the president may propose and, within bounds usually dictated by Congress, may mandate energy programs, but ultimately, it is Congress that legislates energy policy, raises the revenue to underwrite, and oversees its implementation in the executive branch. The president’s freedom to act independently of Congress on energy matters is always limited severely by law, custom, and political circumstance. Even when judges and administrators eventually formulate, interpret, and implement presidential directives, their policymaking is always constrained by congressional guidelines and oversight.
A multitude of committees. The most important centers of power within Congress are its numerous committees and subcommittees, the “little legislatures” inside the big one. The number of congressional committees and subcommittees with energy in their title or their jurisdiction is legion. In the 112th Congress (2011–2013), eleven House committees and four Senate committees exercised some authority over energy matters explicitly in their titles. However, numerous other committees, easily exceeding a dozen in each chamber, were also deeply implicated in energy policymaking by virtue of their comprehensive authority in related matters, such as the budget, foreign affairs, conservation, and environmental management.
The vigorous conflict over energy policy produced by each chamber’s own squabbling, competitive committees is intensified by rivalries between House and Senate energy-related committees. Energy committees, within and between the chambers, often respond to different energy interests. This dispersion of authority among so many legislative entities can sometimes improve the quality of energy policy. But the bargaining and negotiating imposed by diverse congressional interests with leverage in the energy policy process often yields vague, complicated, and inconsistent legislation. Often, no legislative reconciliation of divergent interests is possible, producing the sort of deadlock that frustrated Obama’s efforts in his first term to secure congressional approval of his climate warming proposals.
Five hundred and thirty-five ambassadors. The fragmentation of power in Congress is further advanced by the 535 geographical constituencies represented in both congressional chambers, a vast array of diverse parochial local interests with a powerful influence in the legislative process. Constituents regard their senators and representatives as ambassadors to Washington from their home districts, sent there to energetically promote and protect “the folks back home.” It is hard for any member to resist pressures to act as local agents for their electorate.
With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, and mobile Internet access, legislators are now only a few keystrokes away from constituency voices. It’s small wonder that many legislators consider their constituencies as an extension of their own personalities. Many congressional veterans can understand the late Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s angry warning to colleagues who voted against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new energy exploration: “People who vote against this today are voting against me, and I will not forget it.”21
Thus, when the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’ Democratic majority proposed in 2009 a measure to expand the scope of offshore oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, state loyalty trumped party for five of the committee’s thirteen Democrats. Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, for example, ordinarily a strong supporter of expansive drilling in the Gulf, opposed the measure because none of the potential federal royalties would come to Louisiana, while Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) opposed the measure because it might encourage drilling off the New Jersey coast.22
The executive branch. The executive branch of the federal government is a constitutional fiction, even when organization charts confine the welter of administrative agencies called “the bureaucracy” within the boundary of the president’s executive authority. Within the executive branch are thirteen cabinet departments, fifty-two independent agencies, five regulatory commissions, and numerous lesser entities. More than 2.7 million federal employees divide their loyalties among these institutions.
Congress and the courts often limit presidential authority. Political obstacles constantly confound White House designs for administrative management. The president must contend with agency self-interest, Congressional involvement in agency affairs, and the claims of an agency’s own clientele. The president may be a poor administrator or bored with the job.
The impact of this bureaucratic pluralism is pervasive in energy policy. Congress and the White House personnel rarely formulate major policy without consulting with the affected energy agencies. Moreover, agencies have strong and conflicting preferences about energy management that often grow from their differing constituencies. For example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), responsible under the 1935 Federal Power Act for promoting abundant, reliable energy supply, is more congenial to expansive energy production than the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with its legislative mandate to control the environmental degradation from fossil fuel energy production.
Bureaucracy’s influence in energy policymaking is rooted in the delegated authority and discretionary judgment inherent in the programs implemented by federal agencies. Congress must often grant to agencies very broad, general authority to implement programs, leaving administrators to decide when to apply the law in specific cases and how to interpret vague