Culture of coziness

Thursday, May 27, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

A couple of weeks ago, as the Gulf of Mexico disaster was continuing to unfold, we wrote about how the federal agency that is supposed to regulate offshore oil wells had let the industry police itself for the most part. Oversight has been lax, at best, and much of this can be traced to the policies of the George W. Bush presidency, which let the interests of industry trump those of consumers, workplace safety or the environment. That lack of regulation has come under intense scrutiny following the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP America. The catastrophic explosion killed 11 workers and is causing untold environmental and economic damage along the nearby shores of Louisiana.

Well, a new government investigative report has been released that provides a revealing look at the culture of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, the agency that is supposed to make sure the offshore oil wells are operating safely. The Interior Department’s inspector general, the official tasked with investigating wrongdoing, actually started working on the report in 2008, after receiving a tip that MMS employees in the Lake Charles, La., office had received gifts, including hunting and fishing trips from the Island Operating Co., an oil and gas production company that worked on oil platforms that the Interior Department regulated.

The inspector general wrote that “we found a culture where the acceptance of gifts from oil and gas companies were widespread” in the Lake Charles, La., office. Some employees took a trip to the 2005 Peach Bowl football game paid for by an oil and gas company. One inspector even carried out four inspections of an Island Operating Co. platform while he was seeking employment with the same company.

Lake Charles District Manager Larry Williamson, according to the inspector general’s report, noted that “many of the MMS inspectors had worked for the oil and gas industry and continued to be friends with industry representatives. ‘Obviously, we’re all oil industry,’ he said. ‘We’re all from the same part of the country. Almost all of our inspectors have worked for oil companies out on these same platforms. They grew up in the same towns. Some of these people, they’ve been friends with all their life. They’ve been with these people since they were kids. They’ve hunted together. They fish together. They skeet shoot together ... They do it all the time.’ ”

The inspectors seem to have forgotten that the federal government wasn’t paying them to be someone’s buddy — it was paying them to be regulators who were above reproach.

After the then-regional supervisor of the MMS office in New Orleans was fired in 2007 for accepting gifts from an offshore oil contractor, and additional ethics training was provided to agency employees, Williamson said he made it clear that accepting gifts was not to be tolerated, including even having lunch with an industry representative.

Still, this culture of coziness that existed should be alarming. It was encouraging that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told the inspector general to investigate whether the same kind of ethical failings have occurred since Barack Obama became president. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported, Salazar said the favoring of oil companies could be traced back to the Bush administration, and that for oil companies, “essentially whatever it is they wanted, is what they got.” That is not the case under this administration, Salazar said.

Nonetheless, it is going to take persistence by Salazar, the White House and Congress to transform the MMS into finally becoming a true regulator. Part of it will be the structural reforms that the Obama administration is undertaking, but it also will require a totally different way of thinking by the agency. Those employees who can’t take seriously that their job is to be a regulator, not a tool of industry, should be shown the door immediately.