Advocates Call On Salazar to Relinquish Interior Dept's Oversight of Drilling Safety

WASHINGTON— Interior Secretary Ken Salazar yesterday took a bold step to reform the department's cozy relationship with the oil and gas industry, proposing to divide the Minerals Management Service (MMS) into three separate parts, and abolish its name. (See Addendum below, for details.)

The move may still not be enough to satisfy environmentalists, who were encouraged by initial reform efforts but at the time still wary, unconvinced that the Interior Department could really clean up its own house.

Splitting up the conflicting duties of MMS is imperative, environmentalists say. But positioning the safety and environmental office in the Department of Interior is the equivalent of hiring a fox to guard the henhouse.

In an ideal world, environmental advocates emphasize, MMS’s safety and environmental division would be moved from Interior to another appropriate agency.

Likely candidates include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard or the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. 

“Interior has fundamentally been unable to manage MMS,” Erich Pica, president of the advocacy organization Friends of the Earth, told SolveClimate in a Wednesday interview. “MMS has an inordinate amount of responsibility. When they fail, they can destroy whole communities.”

Salazar might talk about change, Pica continued, but he likely won’t go far enough in taming an agency that has collected an average of $13 billion for the U.S. Treasury annually. About half of its $342 million budget for 2010 comes in fees and rental receipts from the energy industry.

“(MMS) has been a failure for at least 20 years,” Pica said. “We can’t rely on the Department of the Interior to reform itself.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also has spoken out in favor of the idea of moving the safety and environmental function of MMS out of Interior's control.

Structure with More Integrity

Turning a division over to a different department or agency is difficult and politically challenging because politically adept cabinet members, always mindful of their legacy, are reluctant to dismantle their own authority.

Peter Van Tuyn, a longtime environmental attorney based in Anchorage, Alaska who counsels advocacy organizations, maintains that splitting MMS’s duties and moving the oversight duties out of Interior would provide a structure with more integrity.

“We need a secretary who has enough humility to recognize that he can make a stronger, not weaker, department by doing so,” Van Tuyn said in a Wednesday interview. "I have a lot of respect for Salazar. He needs to make some tough decisions.”

Salazar has vowed to reform MMS since he became Interior secretary in early 2009. His first order of business was cleaning up a division of 1,700 employees beset by a sex, drugs and illegal gifts scandal that erupted before Obama took office.

The former senator of Colorado has been in a harsher spotlight since a blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon rig failed April 20, leading to the BP spill that is dumping an estimated 5,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico daily. Almost one-third of this nation’s domestic oil production comes from the gulf.

MMS has been accused of being lax with safety requirements and remiss on heeding advice from scientists and engineers. Just last week, President Obama called for reform after noting the “cozy relationship” between MMS and the oil and gas industry.

Senators Blunt about "Safety Swamp" at MMS

A cool and collected Salazar, who testified at two different congressional hearings thus far this week, was flanked by Liz Birnbaum, the director of MMS, and deputy secretary David Hayes when he answered questions before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for 2½ hours Tuesday. Hayes, Salazar said, took the lead role in the recent reorganization of MMS.