President Barack Obama's administration is betraying increasing frustration at claims it has not done enough to mitigate the environmental consequences, or that it is has been too soft on BP, which it loudly blames for the disaster.

More than a month after the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Obama's foes may sense increasing vulnerability for the administration over the Gulf, as Louisiana politicians, Republicans and media pundits pile in.

In response, the White House is adopting an increasingly aggressive rebuttal operation, emphasizing a wide-ranging federal response to the multiple challenges of a leaking well.

Obama also dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to Louisiana Monday, at the head of a bi-partisan congressional delegation to monitor the clean-up effort.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs meanwhile invited Coast Guard chief Thad Allen, who is overseeing the Gulf operation, to his daily briefing in an apparent effort to counter criticism of the White House response.

In the latest controversy, Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, who has been in close touch with the Obama administration over the disaster, said he had yet to receive all the booms he had requested to protect the shoreline.

"A total of more than 65 miles of our shore now has been oiled," Jindal warned Sunday.

"We can either fight this oil off of our coast... or we are going to be spending months and years removing oil along thousands of miles of fragmented wetlands that serve as critical nursery for marine wildlife."

David Vitter, a Republican senator for Louisiana, stirred the simmering political row on Saturday, in his party's weekly radio address.

"While the crisis actually continues in the Gulf -- Washington Democratic committee chairmen have rushed to create media events for television cameras instead of devoting full attention to stopping the immediate problem," he said.

The southern state wants to use dredgers to create barrier islands or berms between the encroaching oil and pristine wetlands which local officials fear could be wiped out by the disaster.

But the Army Corps of Engineers and the federal government have yet to sign up to the project, apparently concerned such emergency barriers could have adverse environmental effects in other ways.

"I understand Governor Jindal's sense of urgency. We share that sense of urgency, and there is a desire to do something, anything, to intervene here," senior Obama advisor David Axelrod said Monday on MSNBC.

"But what we want to make sure is whatever we do is effective and that it will work."

As it became clear that the leak would trigger an ecological disaster, the White House aggressively blamed BP, and made clear the British energy giant would be forced to comply with US law and pay for the clean-up operation.

Part of that strategy was clearly designed to keep the heat on BP to stem the leak and pay for the costs of the huge operation as quickly as possible.

But it also worked as a viable media strategy -- providing a place for blame for the disaster to rest, other than the administration -- though a month into the disaster, that approach seems to be approaching its sell-by date.

Salazar warned on Sunday that if BP could not stop the leak soon he would "push them out of the way."

That warning however appeared to contradict other administration statements that despite its supposed omnipotence, the government simply lacks the necessary expertise and equipment to contain a serious undersea oil leak.

The Obama White House has repeatedly rejected comparisons between the Gulf disaster and Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that swamped the same coast and George W. Bush's presidency after an inept federal government response.

Officials vehemently deny the federal government is sluggish to respond, or has run out of ideas, or is simply sitting by while BP fails to stem the leak.

"The government is doing everything humanly and technologically possible to plug the hole 5,000 feet below the floor or below the ocean," Gibbs said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

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