What the.....?

I really need to find out more information on this, although I did read a bit about it yesterday. Okay, so, why are the oil companies getting $7B in royalty relief? Why are they getting $35B in tax exemptions? Why are they pulling in billions upon billions in profits? Aren't they profitable enough that they can fund their own R&D and exploration? Is this completely insane or do they have the balls of the Bush Administration grabbed so tight, they can essentially ask for anything and get it?

Congressman starts inquiry of windfall to oil companies

A House Republican began a broad investigation on Wednesday of a US Interior Department program that is expected to give billions of dollars in benefits over the next five years to companies that pump oil and gas on federal territory. In a letter on Wednesday to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, representative Richard Pombo, the chairman of the House Resources Committee, demanded memos, correspondence and data on the program and on the negotiations over the law that created it in 1996. Pombo, a California Republican, said he was beginning the investigation in response to an article published on Tuesday in The New York Times. That article, drawing on the Interior Department's budget plan for next year, reported that the administration expected to give more than US$7 billion worth of "royalty relief" to companies producing oil and gas on federal leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The article also disclosed that energy companies had begun a courtroom challenge to a crucial restriction on the incentives that would, if successful, reduce their taxes by $35B or more by 2012. At issue is a program that Congress began in 1996, when both Democrats and Republicans wanted to encourage more exploration and production in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The program allows the Interior Department, which leases tens of millions of acres of publicly owned land and coastal waters, to let companies pump large volumes of oil and gas in deep waters without paying the government a royalty on their sales. In general, this royalty relief is supposed to stop when oil and gas prices climb above certain trigger points, and prices have been above those points since the end of 2002.
(New York Times 060216)