Lawmakers this week offered a mix of reservations and support — and more than a few shrugs — to the Interior Department’s plan to unify two agencies that manage offshore energy.
The White House last week unveiled plans to merge the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, both of which manage offshore energy production in federal waters. The plan to combine the agencies into the Marine Minerals Administration was also laid out in the president’s budget proposal.
Although the first Trump administration weighed a similar plan, the new proposal was not widely anticipated. Multiple senators appeared unaware as of Tuesday.
Democratic lawmakers familiar with the proposal expressed distaste for the administration’s direction, while several Republicans offered support for what they see as streamlining.
California Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said combining the two Interior bureaus could risk further oil disasters.
Huffman said it was as if the administration had “learned nothing” from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill following a rig explosion that killed 11 workers and injured 17 others the Gulf of Mexico, which President Donald Trump has renamed the Gulf of America.
Huffman said the tragedy occurred “in part because we had these two agencies housed together” “It was riddled with corruption,” Huffman said. “This is a recipe for disaster … and another very transactional deliverable from the Trump administration to Big Oil.”
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (D) said in a statement that, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“These agencies were deliberately separated after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, precisely because we learned the catastrophe that can happen when the agency collecting royalties and issuing drilling permits is the same agency responsible for safety oversight and environmental protection.”
Maine Independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats, said Tuesday that the two agencies have different functions and that he doesn’t endorse merging them. “I don’t understand what the motivation for the move is,” King said.
The Interior Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Among those lawmakers who admitted they are not familiar with the plan was Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R). “I’ve not heard that,” Cassidy said Tuesday about the merger plans, adding that he would look into it. His colleague in the Louisiana delegation, Republican Sen. John Kennedy, said Monday that he didn’t have “a thought about it.”
And Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) deferred commenting on the proposal until he learned more about it.
‘Potential conflict’
Until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe, management of offshore drilling operations was handled by a single entity: the Minerals Management Service.
That changed after internal and external reviews during the Obama administration concluded that responsibility for leasing federal waters should be separated from safety and environmental enforcement duties to avoid conflicts of interest.
“When your agency has a financial stake, that may be dangerous in terms of the potential conflict,” King said.
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Monday that “we’ll look at that.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, “I don’t think [managing leasing and safety enforcement] need to be separated. I think lease sales should be taking into consideration safety anyway.”
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said of the current system: “It is confusing. We do need to come up with a way to try to streamline the process and make it simpler. We want to have good protection for the coastal areas and for any offshore drilling, but it’s still got to work so that you can make the investment and produce the energy.”
Then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar split the Minerals Management Service into BOEM and BSEE in 2011, and the agencies have operated separately ever since. A third agency was created to manage federal revenues from offshore and onshore oil and mineral production.
Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor who was executive director of a bipartisan, independent commission created by President Barack Obama to investigate Deepwater Horizon, called Interior’s decision a “stunning reversal” of “commonsense recommendations.”
The oil and gas industry has long preferred a single agency, which companies believe simplifies operations and would lead to more streamlined management.
“There just was not a lot of logic, I believe, in the government splitting those two functions up,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. “It just makes sense for efficiency to have it all with one agency doing it.”
The merger was considered during the first Trump administration, when Ryan Zinke was Interior secretary. Now a Republican member of Congress from Montana, Zinke said Tuesday he favored simplifying the department’s operations.
“When you have two different agencies and two different chains of command, I think everyone has an equal input, but someone’s going to make the decision,” Zinke said. “I think having a decision made quicker with better information is a good thing.”
Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.
