A new agency for offshore energy development that’s seen its workforce shrink in recent years — and is targeted for funding cuts next year by the Trump administration — will be taking on a quickly growing portfolio of responsibilities.
The Marine Minerals Administration unveiled this month by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will oversee not only a larger oil and gas leasing program but also will help set up and police the nation’s first-ever offshore mining industry.
The agency merges two existing bureaus within the Interior Department that managed energy development and safety in federal waters. While the offshore regulators together once employed 1,500 full-time staffers under the Biden administration, that’s since fallen to about 1,000 employees this year, according to the Office of Personnel Management data. The Trump administration has proposed further reducing the staff down to 874 people.
For Interior and offshore energy industries, the creation of the consolidated agency — reversing a reform of the Obama administration, which had separated the agencies after the deadly Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 — fulfills an idea first floated during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Environmental advocates say the smaller, combined agency envisioned by the current administration won’t have the capacity to properly oversee the expansion of oil and gas leasing across the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska’s coastline required by the GOP’s 2025 budget law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. At the same time, MMA will take on the role of permitting and monitoring a brand new offshore mining sector that Trump wants to see rapidly rolled out.
“This is an agency that’s now been combined and its budget and staff decreased while being charged with not only the safety and responsibility for oversight for the existing offshore drilling infrastructure in the U.S., but now the most massive expansion in U.S. history,” said Joseph Gordon, a campaign director for Oceana, an environmental group.
An Interior spokesperson said in a statement that the new structure will “better align with the Department of the Interior’s mission, streamline governance of offshore energy and mineral resources, and deliver greater value to the American public.”
“Over the last decade, federal offshore energy oversight has been strengthened with stricter safety regulations, more rigorous inspections, enhanced well-control standards, improved incident investigations processes, and stronger compliance monitoring,” the spokesperson said. “Together, these reforms underscore the Department’s commitment to effective and responsible stewardship that safeguards offshore workers, protects coastal communities, and preserves the marine environment.”
But low staffing at the existing Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has caused some internal alarm.
The top offshore safety regulator in Alaska wrote in a public comment last fall that cuts during the Trump administration had left his BSEE office at “below sustainable levels” to manage current levels of leasing, even as the budget law ramped up the number of sales off Alaskan coastlines. While regulators have held five offshore Alaskan oil and gas lease sales over the last 20 years, the law requires five more lease sales off the coast of Alaska through 2032, in addition to the one held in Cook Inlet earlier this year.
After his comment made news, the Trump administration put the official on leave.
The administration is seeking to cut back spending more as it combines the agencies. Interior’s fiscal 2027 spending proposal includes a 42 percent decrease in funding compared to this year, along with a 20 percent cut in staff. Those reductions would come after the administration has already shed hundreds of offshore employees through buyouts and early retirement offers.
The plan would impose a 37 percent cut to oil spill research and eliminate all renewable energy activity, in line with the administration’s efforts to stymie offshore wind development, which is also under BOEM’s purview.
The offshore shakeup is seen as a sensible reform within the nation’s nascent offshore mining sector, which is vying for applications to mine in domestic waters in the outer continental shelf. Federal officials have already announced — and expanded — requests for information on possible mineral leases off the shores of Virginia, Alaska, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
The industry has pushed for more streamlined offshore permitting and “clearer lines of authority,” said Rick de la Torre, a retired CIA operations officer and founder of the lobbying shop Tower Strategy. The firm represents Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida-based ocean exploration and subsea mineral development company that recently merged with American Ocean Minerals in a $1 billion deal.
If structured correctly, the combined agency could reduce duplication and accelerate decision-making, said de la Torre.
“What makes this move more consequential is the timing,” he said. “This is no longer just about oil and gas. It is about securing the inputs that underpin national power, from energy to critical minerals to fertilizer supply chains tied directly to food security.”
“That is where offshore development is heading,” he said, “And the administration deserves credit for recognizing it early.”
Conflicts of interest?
The announced merger of BOEM and BSEE has already exhumed the findings from after the Deepwater Horizon disaster that safety was deprioritized the last time one agency regulated offshore energy.
The explosion in April 2010 at the offshore rig operated by BP killed 11 people and spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Subsequent reviews at Interior and by an independent commission appointed by former President Barack Obama found that offshore management needed “fundamental” reforms, including a separation of the oversight of safety and environmental enforcement from the management of lease sales.
That led to the closure of the Minerals Management Service and the creation of BOEM and BSEE, along with a third office that manages collections of energy and mineral revenues.
“You put those two entities together, the push to focus on the licensing starts to overwhelm,” said Juliette Kayyem, who was assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security during Deepwater Horizon and designated by Obama as director of the national incident command that responded to the spill.
The issues at MMS came as oil companies increasingly looked to develop projects in deep water, which offered a chance at higher profits along with greater safety risks.
The combination of safety and leasing responsibilities at one agency “led inevitably to internal tensions and a confusion of goals that weakened the agency’s effectiveness and made it more susceptible to outside pressures,” concluded the national commission’s 2011 report on the oil spill.
Andrew Hartsig, the Ocean Conservancy’s director of the Arctic and northern waters program, said cutting staff and funding for an agency that’s tasked with a bigger job is dangerous, especially when there’s an inherent conflict of interest in the combined agency. Hartsig pointed to the government’s past problems combining the double mandate of producing oil, gas and minerals with the obligation to ensure the operations are safe and environmental safeguards are in place.
“I’m really worried about the culture of this new MMA being so focused on resource development and production that the oversight and enforcement take a backseat,” he said.
But safety could still be a focus of the combined agency if it is built into the design, said Walter Cruickshank, who served as acting director of BOEM during the early Trump administration and worked for U.S. offshore regulators for more than 40 years until his retirement last June.
Cruickshank said a major benefit of having BSEE as a separate agency was that it automatically inserted a safety official into the regularly scheduled meetings with department heads held by political leadership. Before then, offshore safety largely came up only after an incident.
“That was really a significant change in the visibility of the safety program within the department,” Cruickshank said. But he added that safety could remain a high priority with prominence at top meetings under the new MMA.
“It’s just a question of whether that’s what management wants to happen,” Cruickshank said. “Having it split made it a little organically easier to provide that separate focus on safety, but it can happen either way.”
The Interior spokesperson said that the department will “ensure that appropriate resources and expertise are in place to meet all statutory and regulatory responsibilities.”
Cruickshank said that the need for staffing depends on what an administration’s priorities are. He pointed to the current de-emphasis on offshore wind, which could allow leadership to reassign employees who worked on renewable energy permitting to oil and gas. And while the administration is holding more lease sales, the agency may not face a staffing crunch until and unless the sales receive major interest from companies that decide to pursue projects.
In the short time he worked with him, Cruickshank said he was “really impressed” with Matthew Giacona, the current head of BOEM who is slated to run MMA, according to two people familiar with the administration’s plans.
“Among the folks in BOEM at least, he’s got a very good reputation,” he said.
‘Not some … sneaky backroom issue’
Discussions about unifying BOEM and BSEE have been percolating since 2011 when Interior dismantled the Minerals Management Service, said James Noe, a lawyer with Holland & Knight who lobbies for the energy industry.
Noe represents the National Ocean Industries Association, or NOIA, and Sable Offshore, which operates an oil pipeline in the Pacific Ocean at the center of a fight between California and the Trump administration.
Restructuring MMS wasn’t “inherently objectionable” to industry but wasn’t viewed as necessary, Noe said.
Trump’s first Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, publicly considered recombining the two agencies in 2017.
Noe said the final decision this year to unify BOEM and BSEE was driven by a desire to improve efficiency as the federal government grapples with how to oversee and permit the first-ever mineral production in U.S. waters — not an outside push from industry.
“This is not some sort of sneaky backroom issue [or] Big Oil push onto a midlevel political staffer at Interior,” said Noe. “It’s just been floating around in the ether ever since it happened in 2011.”
But not everyone agrees the focus should be on accelerating and streamlining permitting.
Kayyem said that safety regulations for high-risk industries are not supposed to be “efficient,” because the aim of regulations is to create safeguards that protect against disasters, even if they are never needed.
“The idea that it’s slow kind of misses the point,” she said. “The question is, as a society, do we want to put friction into this process?”
