MMS Gone, Hello BOE., page 1

MMS Gone, Hello BOE.

It took the Bush-Cheney administration eight years to thoroughly corrupt Minerals Management Service. It took the Obama administration fifteen months to change the agency's name, reorganize and divide it, and install a tough administrator who has a reasonable chance of reforming it. Yesterday--

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed an order renaming the agency the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. The agency, which both regulates the oil and gas industry and collects billions in royalties from it, will be known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy or BOE for short, Salazar said.
More important than the name change, there's a new sheriff in town:

Michael R. Bromwich, 56, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Justice Department inspector general, will lead a reorganization of the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service.
Bromwich is a widely respected investigator and former prosecutor whose specialty has become "drilling down into sclerotic government organizations." A number of newspapers and blogs note that he has no "energy experience." They might also want to note that he has no experience taking bribes, shoving coc aine up his nose while partying with oil company reps or sleeping around with oil company women.

MMS doesn't need another drilling engineer. It needs a relentless cop. The other day we heard no less a critic of MMS than Pensacola's own Prof. Enid Sisskin singing the praises of lower-level staff members at MSS.

Sisskin is one of the nation's best-informed experts on drilling policy in the Gulf of Mexico and a frequent witness at congressional oil drilling hearings. She was being interviewed on Pensacola Beach by a documentary filmmaker.

"There are a lot of good people at MMS, very good," she said. However, they are mostly professional lower-level employees. If one reads their internal reports and recommendations, she says -- and they are publicly available -- time and again one sees that lower-level professionals authored thorough, detailed reports with well-reasoned recommendations to protect public and worker safety and the environment. However, Sisskin adds, their reports "were trashed" by higher-up political appointees in MMS during the Bush years and never made it out of the agency's files.

Link "#4"

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[edit on 22-6-2010 by 12m8keall2c]