Reply #3: The MMS [View All]

http://trueslant.com/level/2010/04/30/obama-shares-blame-for-failing-to-prevent-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill/


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The agency charged with enforcing safety regulations on offshore oil rigs is the Minerals Management Service, nestled within the Department of Interior. The MMS, you might recall, was implicated in a doozy of a scandal toward the end of the Bush administration. The part of the agency that was supposed to be ensuring the federal government collected royalties owed to the American people by companies drilling on federal lands had been completely bought off by the very corporations they were regulating. Justin Rood, then at Talking Points Memo, memorably named the scandal ‘sex-for-oil‘ because of findings of ‘improper social ties’ between MMS staff and oil and gas industry executives (oh yeah, they also called it ‘Lubrigate‘). And that was just the salacious part of the scandal – the financial loss to the American public as a consequence of the cozy relationship between MMS regulators and the companies they were collecting from remains difficult to calculate.

Since the Obama administration has come into office, it has taken a path with MMS that would not suggest that safety was its primary concerns where offshore drilling was concerned.

For instance, the budget for safety remained relatively flat, growing by about $3 million from FY2009 to FY2010, the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration, and then seeing an the budget rise about $119,000 more for this coming year.

At the same time, MMS established some new principles for safety inspection concerned more with risk assessment than covering every facility. The most recent budget request from the Department of Interior states outright that “MMS focuses compliance efforts on those operators whose performance does not meet certain targets.” What this means is that they are focused on the facilities with the greatest risk. And to that end, MMS explained in its budget request that while it completed around 27,000 inspections in FY2009 (the last year of the Bush administration), it anticipated completing fewer inspections in both ‘10 and ‘11 – 22,000 and 23,000 respectively. And for that reason, it’s possible that TransOcean’s Deepwater Horizon may not have been on its radar screen.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/08

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by McClatchy Newspapers

Since Spill, Feds Have Given 27 Waivers to Oil Companies in Gulf
by Marisa Taylor

WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.

“Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”

MMS officials said the exemptions are continuing to be issued because they do not represent final drilling approval.

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