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On May 11, 2010,  U.S. Dept. of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that he would separate the public safety and environmental enforcement side of the Minerals Management Services (M.M.S.) agency from its leasing and revenue collection function. While this move eliminateed the structural conflict of interest in the agency, it might not do enough to protect the regulatory function of the agency’s public safety and environmental enforcement roles.  The regulator can all too easily be coopted, or captured, by the firms it is regulating.

According to The New York Times, M.M.S. agency has routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists. Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed.  “M.M.S. has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry,” said Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group in Tucson, which filed notice of intent to sue the agency over its noncompliance with federal law concerning endangered species. “The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws.” One scientist who has worked for M.M.S. for more than a decade, said, “You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an impact. If you find the risks of a spill are high or you conclude that a certain species will be affected, your report gets disappeared in a desk drawer and they find another scientist to redo it or they rewrite it for you.” For one thing, the regulators rely on information from the firms–data that is hardly provided in an objective fashion.  But such reliance pales in comparison with the political muscle of the oil companies–their campaign contributions being just the tip of the iceberg.  Moreover, large concentrations of capital are inherently a threat to a viable republic.

It should be no surprise that the government would welcome the cooperation from the companies involved in the accident in the Gulf; it reduced the pressure on the officials to go after the companies (and hence risk alienating their future contributions).  According to The New York Times, “Under federal law, even in the case of a major accident, the company responsible for the oil well acts in concert with government in cleanup activities and can help put out information about the response effort.”  Shortly after the spill, government agencies and BP set up a joint information center and a Web site detailing remediation efforts. BP started to promote its attempts to “stop the bleeding” (i.e., cut off the leaking oil in the Gulf).  With a restored image, the company could resume lobbying for less regulation, even though the accident demonstrates insufficient enforcement.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12interior.html?ref=us ; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14agency.html?hp