Head of Minerals Management Service Fired: Who Was Liz Birnbaum?

[The Straight Story]

Head of Minerals Management Service Fired: Who Was Liz Birnbaum?
Saturday, May 29, 2010

S. Elizabeth (Liz) Birnbaum, director of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) since July 14, 2009, became the first leading official in the Obama administration to lose her job over the federal government’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But whether Birnbaum deserved to be fired, or merely became the scapegoat, is a matter of debate.

Two days before her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, asked her to resign, Birnbaum was the subject of an unflattering story in The New York Times. The article portrayed the veteran of Washington, DC, as keeping too low a profile while the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico unfolded. It also reported that MMS experts complained she had done little to reform the agency that had a long reputation for buddying up to industry.

Friends of Birnbaum countered that she was never instructed by Salazar to clean house. Instead, she spent much of her nine months on the job promoting renewable energy, particularly the contested issue of putting a wind farm off Cape Cod.

“She still doesn’t get it,” an acquaintance of Birnbaum told Greenwire. “She still doesn’t understand she’s being made the poster child for all this. She thinks on the merits.”

From the reaction President Barack Obama gave to reporters when questioned about Birnbaum’s dismissal, it did not appear the termination was ordered from the White House. The president added that Salazar’s job was safe.

http://www.allgov.com/Appointments_and_Resignations/ViewNews/Head_of_Minerals_Management_Service_Fired__Who_Was_Liz_Birnbaum_100529

[zeemike]

1. What does a wind farm have to do with mineral management.

i would like to know.