The bill, which would allow for an easing of clean-air laws to keep power plants in service and would simplify rules allowing the federal government to sell its power to the state, was approved 17 to 13 in an energy subcommittee.

At the same time, the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDC) was established to coordinate defense research, and Bush asked Conant to head its atomic energy subcommittee, on which Oppenheimer also served.

Mr. Domenici, chairman of the energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is shepherding the privatization plan through Congress, was never informed of the offer by the Administration.

Delegate Ports was also a member of the National Task Force on Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources, and the American Legislative Exchange Council from 1991 until 2003, serving as vice-chair of the energy subcommittee.

So it was not unusual recently for a member of President Clinton's cabinet, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, to phone Mr. Frelinghuysen, who sits on an important energy subcommittee.

Of that effort, Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he believed that the "G.A.O. report will haunt it."

Mr. Sharp noted that when the Clean Air Act was amended in 1977, the energy subcommittee did not even have hearings on it.

The institute said that the statement had been prepared by their energy subcommittee, but would not reveal who had produced it.

Shortly before Mr. Connaughton testified, Stephen Eule, director of the Climate Change Technology program at the Energy Department, gave the energy subcommittee of the House Committee on Science an overview of the administration's technology priorities.

Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which recommends funding levels for the project, said that the accounting office's numbers were "not out of the estimating ballpark from what we expected."