Hegseth won't commit to obeying courts on Marines in Los Angeles
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to say whether he would follow the courts if they ruled against President Donald Trump's deployment of active-duty Marines to Los Angeles.
The Pentagon chief repeatedly deflected when asked Thursday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing whether he would respect a federal district or Supreme Court decision on the issue.
'What I can say is we should not have local judges determining foreign policy or national security policy for the country,' Hegseth said.
Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into Los Angeles in response to mass deportation protests and over the objections to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is suing in response.
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'This compaction of the pore spaces can lead to a permanent loss of storage capacity, making it much harder to extract remaining oil and potentially causing the rock to crack under the immense pressure of the overlying layers,' Misra wrote in response to questions from E&E News. 'In simpler terms, the site might not be able to hold as much oil anymore, and future extraction becomes a more difficult and less efficient process.' The pressure on the surrounding rock when fluid is removed can also cause the barriers of the salt cavern to begin to slowly deform and squeeze inward 'like a very thick, gooey Play-Doh or taffy that's slowly moving,' Misra said. That can put tremendous pressure on steel pipes, known as casings, that run into the cavern and carry fluids up and down into the storage site. Those pipes can get bent, be crushed or break completely by the inward push of the salt in the salt domes. 'This not only makes it harder to get oil or gas out but can also lead to dangerous failures, reducing the cavern's lifespan and safety,' Misra wrote. A decade ago, officials began a program to upgrade equipment and facilities that were approaching or near a projected 25-year life span, according to a 2023 annual SPR report from DOE to Congress. That SPR program — known as Life Extension 2 — is still ongoing. Kevin Book, a managing director at the ClearView Energy Partners research firm, said DOE contractors are still working through a backlog of deferred maintenance projects. 'There's still more to do,' Book said. That maintenance, and some issues with logistics and pipeline dynamics, made it difficult for the Biden administration to refill the SPR after the 2022 withdrawals, Book said. 'If you look at the solicitations that happened during the Biden administration, they posted what they said were the sort of formal nameplate capacities for filling the reserves,' Book said. 'But when you look at what they actually were able to take in when they did the procurement, it never got above even half that.' The Biden administration sought to replenish the SPR through several solicitations after the 2022 drawdowns, although it canceled some purchases when crude prices rose above $79 a barrel. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude had settled at about $68 per barrel in futures trading Thursday, but it later rose above $70 per barrel in the wake of Israel's attack on Iran. Former Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk said in late 2023 that the Energy Department was limited to purchasing about 3 million barrels a month due to SPR constraints. 'That is the physical limit of how much we can buy back,' Turk said in a Bloomberg TV interview reported on by the news service. 'We hope we can bring more capacity online at these price levels to buy as much as we can to refill. We will buy back as much as we possibly can, but there are some physical constraints.' At that rate, it would take more than five years and three months for the SPR to reach the same level of storage it had on tap at the end of 2021, and nearly 10 years to reach roughly 700 million barrels in reserves — the goal mentioned by Wright in March. Wright on Tuesday said refilling the SPR is a matter of national security and global perceptions. 'It's a reduction in our security right now because we have meaningfully less oil stored in our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and I think it's a reduction in confidence in the seriousness of the United States,' Wright testified. 'Strategic petroleum reserves are for strategic challenges that may arise in our future that we need to be prepared for.' Reporter Andy Picon contributed.
