Drilled, Baby, Drilled: The strange battle to keep Big Oil from cheating
Three years ago this month, outside some drab federal offices in Lakewood, a bespectacled man sporting a white cowboy hat and a bolo tie stood in a teeth-rattling wind before a clump of reporters and bureaucrats and declared his intention to lay down the law.
“We’re no longer doing business as usual,” he said. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
Ken Salazar, Barack Obama’s newly minted Secretary of the Interior, delivered his remarks with hardly a shiver or a smile. As far as anyone could tell, he was completely serious.
During his confirmation hearing days earlier, still-Senator Salazar vowed to restore public confidence in the Department of the Interior, a troubled fiefdom that controls one-fifth of the land mass of the United States and a million square miles of ocean known as the Outer Continental Shelf. And he chose to kick off his reform campaign at the Denver Federal Center offices of the Minerals Management Service — the most dysfunctional, ethically challenged and scandal-rocked agency in the entire DOI.
Until a few months before Salazar arrived in Lakewood, few people had ever heard of MMS. Responsible for collecting royalties on oil, gas and mineral leases on federal lands, Indian reservations and offshore waters, MMS was small in size but huge in its impact on federal revenues, bringing in between $10 billion and $20 billion a year. It was an obscure yet extremely important bit of government business.
But in the waning days of the Bush administration, MMS had become the stuff of lurid headlines. A series of reports by Earl Devaney, the department’s inspector general, had denounced “a culture of ethical failure” inside the agency — a polite term for the brazen conflicts of interest, corruption, drug use and sexual liaisons uncovered by Devaney’s investigators. MMS employees had accepted gifts, booze, meals, trips and, in some cases, sex from executives of oil and gas companies. One high-ranking official had steered lucrative consulting contracts to a former aide, violating procurement rules. A Lakewood supervisor had allegedly pressured employees for blow jobs and cocaine, referring to the toot as “office supplies.”
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