Go on take the money and run

This must have been the song playing at the secret Cheney energy meetings since the Bush Administration seems uninterested in getting the funds that are really owed to taxpayers by the oil and gas companies. The federal deficit is over $400 billion and the Bush Administration's response is to get rid of the folks trying to make sure taxpayers are fully compensated for use of public lands? From the American Progress report:

"At a time when energy prices and industry profits are soaring, the federal government collected little more money last year than it did five years ago from the companies that extracted more than $60 billion in oil and gas from publicly owned lands and coastal waters," the New York Times reports. "If royalty payments in fiscal 2005 for natural gas had risen in step with market prices, the government would have received about $700 million more than it actually did." American taxpayers have missed out on the booming natural gas industry at a time when "the Interior Department has scaled back on full audits, pushed out a couple of its more aggressive auditors and been criticized by its own inspector general for the audits that it did pursue." "These companies had knowingly been cheating on oil for years, if not decades," said Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight. "To ignore the likelihood that the same thing is happening on the gas side is absurd."