Interior Secretary Ken Salazar plans to break up the Minerals Management Service in the wake of the offshore well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The rationale is that the MMS has an internal conflict-of-interest because it is responsible for both generating revenue through offshore leases as well as protecting worker safety and the environment. To eliminate the conflict, the two tasks will be separated; one agency will focus on leasing, the other on regulation.
“The job of ensuring energy companies are following the law and protecting the safety of their workers and the environment is a big one,” Mr. Salazar said, “and should be independent from other missions of the agency.” . . .
In announcing his plan to split up the minerals service, Mr. Salazar said it had become clear that the agency’s two missions were often in conflict. He said that he had undertaken a number of steps to improve ethics and tighten safety enforcement at the agency but that he decided more radical steps were needed.
Mr. Salazar also announced that he had asked the National Academy of Engineering to conduct an investigation of the causes of the Deepwater Horizon accident, a task that now falls solely on the minerals management agency and the United States Coast Guard.
And he said he was seeking a change in the law to provide more time for regulators to review safety and environmental plans for new wells. The law now requires government to act within 30 days on an application for a new well; Mr. Salazar would lengthen that to 90 days or longer if needed.
Internal agency conflicts, such as between raising revenue and reducing environmental risk, pose the threat that one goal will become subordinate to the other. But separating the functions does not necessarily solve the problem, and can create new ones of its own. Two separate agencies may each pursue their own goals, but insofar as they conflict, a Presidential Administration may still be able to privilege one over the other. Without internal conflicts, agencies may also be more prone to “tunnel vision” and the single-minded pursuit of narrow goals without adequate consideration of trade-offs and collateral consequences. Splitting up MMS may be a good idea, but I doubt it would have prevented this accident. The costs of this spill to BP are far greater than any potential regualtory infractions, so I am not sure that reorganizing regulatory structures would necessarily prevent this sort of thing from happening again.