The federal agency responsible for regulating off-shore drilling is the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. You’d think with a name like that it would be a pretty sleepy sort of place. But as longtime TPM readers know, far from it.
Back during the Bush administration the MMS had a series of big scandals tied to rampant drug use, orgies, lax or non-existent auditing and oversight. Sex for oil. When you think about it, who’s got time for auditing when there’s so much drugs and so many orgies going on at the office?
Anyway, it’s not immediately clear whether all this shagging and drugging on the job contributed to the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon. But we thought we’d run through the agency’s recent history and try to see whether that had anything to do with their apparently not considering the possibility that Deepwater Horizon could be the site of a major spill.
