The administration failed on this issue in so many ways. Why didn't the Obama administration:
(1) waive OSHA requirements that forced private contractors to sit on the sideline as much as they fought the oil spill?
(2) waive EPA requirements that kept the US from accepting foreign aid in cleaning up the oil spill?
(3) put a military person in charge of the clean-up in order to coordinate all resources?
(4) attach the Coast Guard and Naval ships capable of performing clean-up operations to the above mentioned military person (a general or admiral)?
(5) buy/rent as much boom material as could be obtained on the world market in order to keep the oil spill from land? (the oil is now in the LA marsh, meaning that the ecosystem of the marshes is now destroyed)
(6) use some of that stimulus money to hire additional personnel to supplement BP's laughable clean-up attempts?
Additionally, if I were POTUS I would have called up the C-suite at BP and told them that if they did not do everything in their company's power to contain the oil spill (which would have meant hiring more than the rediculously small number of people they have hired to help in cleaning up THEIR mess) ... if they did not put a real attempt at cleaning up this mistake I would use everything in my arsenal as POTUS to ensure they ended up in a federal pen with a homosexual rapist.
Going forward, why didn't the administration take a look at how to stop this from occurring in the future? Immediately they would have seen that the Netherlands allows offshore drilling, but only when an oil company agrees to dig not one, but two wells. If that had happened in this instance, within hours of the burst pipe the rig could have switched over to the redundant well, stopping the leak entirely. Also, the administration, instead of issuing their inane moratorium on drilling could have mandated that any future extractions would have to be done with a double-walled extraction pipe, and not the single-walled pipe BP used to save on costs. Oh, and most importantly, if I were POTUS I would be damned before I allowed a limit to be established on the damage claims that the public has to BP. All that did was reward bad behavior.
But you see, I think this is straight out of the whole school of thought to "never let a crisis go to waste". Mark my words, this spill will be used to pass legislation the administration wants and would be otherwise dead in the water.