House panel assesses blame for Interior hiring woes

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
February 28, 2014

The Obama administration is failing to prioritize the hiring and retention of oil and gas employees at its energy bureaus, leading to slower permitting and lagging production on public lands, according to a leading House Republican.

But there's little the administration can do to close the "yawning" salary gap that drives would-be government employees to private industry, said a key Democrat who criticized the GOP for belittling government service through budget cuts and a government shutdown.

Those were the storylines from members of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources yesterday at a hearing to discuss a Government Accountability Office report faulting the Interior Department's oil and gas hiring programs.

All agreed that the biggest challenges Interior faces in hiring and retaining skilled staff are the higher salaries in industry and the lengthy federal hiring process.

But GAO said Interior has also failed to offer adequate recruitment, relocation and retention incentives for geologists, engineers and inspectors, and has kept poor records of its hiring process, making it difficult to identify problems (E&ENews PM, Feb. 20).

Vacancies at Interior have led to slowdowns in the processing of drilling permits, lease reviews, resource planning and seismic studies to locate oil and gas reservoirs, GAO found. It noted that one Bureau of Land Management field office in California in 2013 postponed all remaining oil and gas leasing activities due in part to the need to shift staff to permitting and inspections.

The average time to hire a petroleum engineer at Interior is 120 days, more than 50 percent longer than the Office of Personnel Management's goal, GAO said.

Chairman Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) hit that point hard, arguing that staffing shortages have hobbled production.

"It is hard to imagine a graduate with loans and offers from companies who may want to do public service to instead sit idly by while the department waits months upon months to make hiring decisions," Lamborn said. "Clearly, the Department of Interior is not using all available tools to correct the problems with hiring and retention of staff."

But he, too, acknowledged other factors affecting hiring that were highlighted by GAO, such as the lack of availability of affordable housing in areas including North Dakota's oil-rich Bakken Shale region.

Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, the subcommittee's top Democrat, said Bureau of Labor Statistics data show petroleum engineers make $97,000 working in the federal government, but $161,000 in private industry.

"It's the salary, stupid," Holt said, riffing on a book title by Democratic strategist James Carville. "There's really no incentive the Department of Interior can offer to make up for that gap."

Moreover, budget cuts and congressional scrutiny have attached a negative stigma to government agencies including BLM, Holt said.

"You're told you cannot attend professional conferences because of a cutback in funding. You know that every email you send could end up in The New York Times after being subpoenaed by a congressional committee looking to embarrass you or your administration," he said. "In short, employees are not getting what we owe them."

Interior has made hiring improvements particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, said Ned Farquhar, Interior's deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, a post that oversees BLM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

He said BSEE hired 178 employees in 2013 -- a net gain of 94 employees -- in part by offering student loan repayment incentives. All three bureaus are actively scouring dozens of technical schools and universities for talent, and BLM is requesting that Congress authorize new inspection fees to facilitate a more stable funding regime, he said.

BLM is working closely with the Bureau of Reclamation in North Dakota to secure land access to address housing challenges while also preparing a request to OPM for locality pay, he said.

Congress passed legislation following the Deepwater Horizon spill to allow higher wages for oil and gas employees in the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, Congress inserted language in its fiscal 2014 appropriations bill giving BLM the ability to hike base salaries for petroleum engineers.

Interior could offer more incentives, but money is tight, Farquhar said.

"If the tools are available, great," he said. "If the budget isn't there to pay for the tools, we can't obviously afford to use them."

Beyond hiring and retention salary incentives, "we must make public service a stable and rewarding alternative to working in private industry," he said.