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The Minerals Management Service, a division within the Interior Department, was a troubled agency long before the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the recent revelations of employee misconduct. The agency -- which oversees U.S. offshore drilling, including the Gulf of Mexico -- has come under fire for mismanagement, questionable conduct and cozy relationships with industry officials.

The MMS issued permits for the Deepwater Horizon drill rig -- contracted by BP -- which exploded on April 20. The explosion killed 11 people and resulted in an oil spill that is threatening parts of the Gulf.

Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar, during an appearance Wednesday before the House Committee on Natural Resources, said he was trying to change the agency's culture and its structure, which some critics say leads to mismanagement. "My belief is that most of the employees of the MMS are good public servants," Salazar said. He, however, acknowledged some of the past conduct was "scandalous" and "reprehensible." Salazar said some people have been fired and others referred for prosecution.

The Obama administration has said in recent weeks that many of the problems within the MMS were inherited from the Bush administration. Salazar, during his testimony and in his answers to members of Congress on Wednesday, also made that point.

During the hearing, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado, asked Salazar why he and other officials were "harping on what MMS did or didn't do in the previous administration."

"Why aren't we talking about the here and now?" Lamborn asked.

Salazar was blunt in his response. "We've done a lot to clean the house at MMS, unlike the previous administration," he said. "This is not the candy store of the oil and gas kingdom which you and others were a part of."

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The report said all the events detailed in it occurred before 2007. In one case, an inspector in the MMS office in Lake Charles, Louisiana, conducted inspections of four offshore platforms while negotiating a job with the company, the report said. Others let oil and gas company workers fill out their inspection forms in pencil, with the inspectors writing over those entries in ink before turning them in.

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In 2008, during the waning months of the Bush administration, Earl Devaney, then the Interior Department's inspector general, issued a report condemning the behavior of some of the agency's employees. "The single-most serious problem our investigations revealed is a pervasive culture of exclusivity, exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the federal government," the report said. The report said, between 2002 and 2006, some of the staff received gifts from oil and gas companies with whom they were conducting business.

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It’s now official, our government really is in bed with Big Oil. We’re not talking fancy rhetoric here or overzealous propaganda. According to a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Interior, a group of public servants entrusted with collecting in-kind royalty payments from oil companies operating on our public lands, were actually bedding down, doing drugs and accepting gifts from oil company employees. Between 2002 and 2006, fully one-third of the In- Kind Royalty Division, based outside Denver, Colorado, had improper relations with and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from Big Oil. Two of the 19 employees cited received gifts on more than 135 occasions from Shell, Chevron, Hess and Denver-based Gary Williams Energy Corp, the LA Times reported. In return, the MMS employees shared key information, helped fix contracts and worked part-time as oil consultants – blatantly shunning the ethics rules that govern all federal workers. This week’s bombshell is the latest in a series of reports about MMS. “During the past year, in September and again in May, inspector-general reports have portrayed MMS as a nest of conflict, lapsed controls and potential criminal conduct,” reported the Denver Post.

Despite these ongoing revelations, the Bush administration is using MMS to give Big Oil access to as much of our nation’s public land as possible before a new administration moves into the White House. Just this week, Big Oil’s friends in Congress are gearing up to introduce legislation that would open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other special places to oil drilling. And, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has decided that MMS will develop a new five-year plan – the government’s map to oil and gas leasing over the next five years - a few years early in order to streamline Big Oil’s access to millions of acres of sensitive offshore area.

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The key facts have been in the press, but the political implications and the timeline are still not well understood. For starters, as Juliet Eilperin reported, back on April 6, 2009, the MMS chose to give the Deepwater Horizon project a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement for a detailed examination of possible environmental impacts. What's more, as Ian Urbina reported in the Times Thursday, MMS also simply ignored warnings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and MMS' own scientists that the drilling represented a threat to endangered species. Specifically, a September 2009 letter from NOAA "accused the minerals agency of a pattern of understating the likelihood and potential consequences of a major spill in the Gulf and understating the frequency of spills that have already occurred there." Urbina reported that a half-dozen current or former MMS scientists told him that "managers at the agency have routinely overruled staff scientists whose findings highlight the environmental risks of drilling."

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: By 2009, of course, Barack Obama was already in the White House. But it takes time to staff an administration and take charge of an agency. Current MMS director Liz Birnbaum didn't take office until July 2009, months after the exclusion was granted. More to the point, the dysfunctional attitude of MMS managers reflected problems that were deeply ingrained under the previous administration. Consider, for example, the fiasco of the Royalty in Kind program. The saga starts back in 1997 when, under Bill Clinton, the government cared about doing things properly. At this point in time, MMS responded to evidence that energy interests were underpaying royalties to the federal government by proposing a more stringent rule to collect Royalties in Value (RIV), i.e., money from drillers and miners. Industry didn't like that and countered instead with a proposal to pay Royalties in Kind (RIK), i.e., oil or gas that they thought would be cheaper. The Clinton administration agreed to an RIK pilot program, but soon found itself out of office. Then along came the Bush administration and Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, which was urged by the American Petroleum Institute to aggressively expand the program. Starting in 2003, the Government Accountability Office repeatedly issued criticisms of the RIK program on a nearly annual basis saying it lacked "clear strategic objectives linked to statutory requirements" and shouldn't be expanded. But it was steadily expanded each and every year of the Bush administration because statutory requirements aside, RIK was great at achieving the president's objective of letting oil companies make more money. By September 2009, a new team was in charge and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the program would be terminated. The RIK scam, of course, was not the cause of the oil spill any more than failure to consult NOAA about endangered species implications did the deed. Both incidents, however, reflect the existence of a culture of indifference to the substantive missions of government agencies. This, of course, was the very essence of the Bush administration approach to government. When a regulator could be staffed by shills for the industry it was supposed to oversee, it was. When no industry particularly wanted to own an agency, like FEMA, it was handed over to a random crony. The results were disastrous and we're still paying the price today.

Clearly, Republican excusers should never, ever be in high political posiitions of responsibility. No you can't have it both ways. But two things: 1. bureaucracies are slow almost by definition, and you can't walk in and fire everyone just to make sure you stop wrong things. Some amount of time is required. 2. there is a long list of appointees to leadershiip positions which is to this day held up by individuals who want to see failures in government. Filling those positions matters.

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Yesterday one of W.'s typically inept and/or corrupted heckofajob political hacks resigned. Chris Oynes the associate director of Offshore Energy and Minerals Management at the Minerals Management Service will retire May 31. Oynes, of course, served as a total tool for the oil industry during his tenure at the MMS.

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Oynes, who oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for 12 years before being promoted to MMS associate director for Offshore Energy and Minerals Management, has come under fire for being too close to the industry officials he regulated.

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It seems that the Bush Administration made a practice of promoting bungling and inept bureaucrats. One cannot help but think that Republicans willfully appoint idiots to serve in our U.S. government for the sole purposes of destroying it while robbing taxpayers blind at the same time.

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During his tenure at the Gulf regional office in Louisiana for the MMS, Chris Oynes played a central role in an offshore leasing foul-up that cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in lost revenue. The Interior Department's inspector general called the matter "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." Despite that, the agency's then-director promoted Mr. Oynes in 2007 to associate director for the offshore program.

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The gusherf**ck continues to spew out of control.
Thank you oil boys Bush, Cheney and all of your heckofajob tools. None of this would have been possible were it not for you.

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...appreciate the cruel contradiction that the people who feel holiest are likely to do very unholy things precisely because they feel holiest.

--Almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff.

--A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.

It’s as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas--stored in a different file--basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file holds, “My country, love it or leave it.” The ideas were copied from trusted sources, often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never “merged files” to see how well they all fit together.

--There’s no contradiction, in a highly compartmentalized mind, between believing that America stands for international cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict on the one hand, while on the other hand insisting it has the “right” to attack whomever it wants, no matter how weak they are, whenever it wants for whatever reasons it decides are good enough. Those who protested were trouble-makers; everyone should support the government.

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