WASHINGTON - While House Republican leaders scramble to fix a $150 billion shortfall in their proposed deficit plan, Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rush Holt (D-N.J.) today introduced a bill that would recover that exact amount. The legislation would end the practice of sending revenue generated from offshore oil drilling in federal waters to selected states, recovering an estimated $150 billion in the coming decades.
"This program amounts to an oil-funded entitlement program for only a few states, a kind of oil well welfare that drains our U.S. Treasury and chooses the interests of a few over those of all Americans," said Rep. Markey, the Ranking Member of the Natural Resources Committee. "Normally, welfare means the largess of the state. But with this oil welfare, it's the largess going to the states. If House Republicans are serious about cutting the deficit and making up the difference in their floundering proposals, they can start by ending this unfair practice."
"Oil fields off of our national coasts do not belong to any one governor or state legislature and should not be used to pad any favored state's budget, said Rep. Holt, the Ranking Member of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee. "These resources are the shared property of all Americans, and the revenues they generate should support the entire country in its efforts to build new infrastructure, create new jobs, and support next-generation energy research."
The legislation, called the "Gulf Coast Oil and Gas Royalty Giveaway Repeal and Deficit Reduction Act," would repeal provisions from a 2006 law, the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which sent revenues from offshore drilling in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico to four states - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. The Department of Interior has estimated that the 2006 law will cost American taxpayers $150 billion over the next 60 years.
Coastal states already get 100 percent of the revenue from all drilling in state waters, which is generally the first three miles from shore. In addition, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gives states 27 percent of the revenue from drilling in the first three miles of federal waters, generally three to six miles offshore.
