Senator on MMS: Don't Split It, Abolish It

For Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's proposal to reorganize the Minerals Management Service by splitting it three ways doesn't go far enough. In a letter to Salazar today, Shaheen urges him to dismantle the agency and start over.

"I fear that a culture of incompetence and corruption will still exist at the agency unless broad scale personnel changes accompany that reorganization," said Shaheen in the letter. "As you recently stated in the Senate Energy Committee in reference to reforming MMS, 'we need to clean up that house.' I think we need to clean out that house. It is time to abolish MMS and start anew with a new agency and new people."

Shaheen specifically referenced yesterday's inspector general report that revealed several employees in MMS's Lake Charles, La., district office admitted to accepting gifts, such as trips to sporting events, from oil and gas companies the agency regulates.

When the head of the district office responds to those revelations of cozy relationships by saying, "Obviously, we're all oil industry" (as he did in the IG report), it's clear that you've got more than an organizational problem on your hands. Structural changes won't help if an agency's culture is animated by relationships between government and industry that are simply too close for comfort. Ethics training may not do the trick either.

That said, it strikes me as facile to suggest that Interior simply "start anew with a new agency and new people." That would be a years-long undertaking. And where, exactly, would the new people come from? If they couldn't be current MMS employees, or presumably, people working in the industry, it would be a mammoth undertaking to hire and train them. In the meantime, whatever replaced MMS would likely do an even worse job of oversight and regulation.