The Trump administration is creating a new office that critics say could weaken the environmental oversight of oil drilling and seabed mining in territorial waters.
The new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, will be formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in an effort to increase environmental oversight of the energy industry and prevent future oil disasters.
After the split, the Interior Department’s oil-leasing activities were separated from environmental regulation and financial management.
The move is “worrisome because it has the potential of bringing things back where they were, where there was this inherent conflict of interest between promotion of offshore oil and gas, and oversight safety,” according to Donald Boesch, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
At a Wednesday hearing on President Trump’s budget proposal for next year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that recombining the two offices would cut red tape that has held up new energy projects. “These unification efforts will streamline bureaucracy,” Mr. Burgum said.
The new office, part of the Interior Department, will oversee offshore oil and gas drilling, which the Trump administration has prioritized since taking office in 2025.
It will also enact the president’s deep-sea mining agenda in national waters, and hold lease sales for mineral deposits found on the seabed areas in territorial waters.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 crew members on the rig, caused catastrophic damage to ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico and had lasting health and economic effects on coastal communities. Federal investigations after the disaster, including one that Dr.
Boesch coauthored, found that the regulatory body at the time had become too close to the oil and gas industry it was supposed to oversee, and was structured in a way that prioritized energy development at the expense of safety and environmental concerns.
The Obama administration later split it up into three bureaus to separate the conflicting interests. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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