Like we didn't already know!

By Kent Garber

Posted May 25, 2010

 

"Cozy relationship" is one of those phrases Washington loves. During the financial crisis, there were allegations of cozy relationships between bankers and the government regulators who were supposed to be policing them in the public interest. It's a similar story with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "For too long, for a decade or more," President Obama said recently, "there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill."

Obama was referring specifically to the Minerals Management Service, which is part of the Interior Department. It has long been a problem child. In 2008, an inspector general's report found that MMS workers weren't just cozy with the industry but were, in fact, holding sex and drug parties with industry representatives. And that was just the most visible problem for an agency with the conflicting roles of oil-revenue producer and safety enforcer.

It was no shock, then, that Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar last week announced that he wants to split the agency into three parts: one to award drilling permits, one to collect the royalties that energy companies pay to the government (an average of $13 billion a year), and one to carry out safety inspections and enforce environmental rules, unhindered by real or imagined revenue considerations. Nor was it a shock today when Interior's current inspector general, Mary Kendall, released her own scathing report on MMS, noting that at least through 2008 the agency had fostered "a culture where the acceptance of gifts from oil and gas companies were widespread."