“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is not an ATM,” Lisa Murkowski, chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee warned the Senate this week. “It is certainly not the petty cash drawer for Congress.” The senator from Alaska was criticizing a proposal to sell 101 million barrels of crude from the government’s stocks to offset a shortfall in funding in the highway trust fund. “Others are potentially looking to our Strategic Petroleum Reserve as nothing more than a piggybank,” Murkowski admonished her colleagues in a floor speech delivered on Wednesday. There is nothing new or particularly surprising about Congress raiding pots of apparently surplus assets to pay for short-term spending priorities. Between fiscal 1993 and fiscal 2005, almost $6 billion worth of […]