Probe of BP spill report called waste

WASHINGTON, May 9 (UPI) -- A Democratic U.S. congressman says Republicans are wasting money by investigating a copy-editing error on a report about the BP oil spill.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., chaired the Natural Resources Committee at the time of the 2010 spill. He said that a mistake in the executive summary of the report that suggested a committee of outside experts agreed with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's call for a moratorium on deepwater drilling was corrected immediately with a prompt apology from Salazar, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reported.

"Rather than wasting the government's time and money investigating the editing of the executive summary of a two-year-old report, the administration and the Congress should be focused on the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself and making sure nothing like it ever hits gulf coast communities again," Markey said. "It is quite clear based on the voluminous documents examined by the committee's Democrat[ic] staff that this is much ado about nothing."

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who now chairs the committee, disagreed.

"The report falsely stated the professional views of independent engineers and the moratorium directly caused thousands of lost jobs, economic pain throughout the gulf region, and a decline in American energy production," Hastings said. "It's important to clearly understand exactly how this happened."