The Trump administration plans to restructure federal oversight of offshore oil and gas by bringing together two Interior Department agencies that were separated after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Interior Department said Friday. The Department said the change would fold the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement into a single Marine Minerals Administration, which would handle the combined functions of the two agencies.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the overhaul is intended to increase efficiency and accelerate the permitting process for offshore energy development. He said in a statement that the new organization would use what he described as a “streamlined approach” that would maintain existing regulatory protections and rigorous safety standards. Burgum said the combined agency would “deliver clearer coordination, better service to the public and stronger, more integrated oversight of offshore energy development.”
The new agency name is reminiscent of the Minerals Management Service, an earlier Interior unit that for decades oversaw offshore drilling. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010, critics argued the oversight structure had become too cozy with the oil industry, particularly as the rig’s explosion killed 11 people and discharged nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the following three months.
In the years after the spill, Interior moved to dismantle the Minerals Management Service structure. In 2011, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement replaced the disbanded Minerals Management Service, and the former agency’s revenue management functions were moved into a separate office. The Obama administration said the reorganization was designed to remove what it described as complex and sometimes conflicting missions that had existed under the Minerals Management Service model.
Environmental groups said the Trump-era reorganization risks returning to the problems they associate with the earlier agency. Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said regulators could not be trusted after the MMS era because of past concerns about oversight. She also said the agency had been intentionally split after the Gulf spill because regulators were too closely aligned with industry, and “we couldn’t trust the integrity of their work,” according to her remarks reported Friday.
Sakashita said the new set-up “sounds like yet another handout to the oil industry that will fast-track risky projects,” and she added that it would not make people or wildlife on U.S. coasts any safer. Other parts of the government’s scrutiny that followed the disaster included a 2008 report by the Interior Department’s inspector general, which said employees accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and sex with employees of energy firms they regulated. The inspector general report also said the agency’s head resigned in May 2010 under public pressure, less than a year into her tenure.
Officials and industry groups emphasized that the current structure can create duplication and delays. The National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore developers, said it supports the concept of returning the agencies into a single unit because administering the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act can otherwise result in inconsistencies. In a statement, association President Erik Milito said bringing the agencies together should result in closer coordination and a more efficiently functioning government, “for the benefit of American citizens who rely upon the energy produced from the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf to fuel our economy and lift society.”
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