Regulation of Offshore Rigs Is a Work in Progress

But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore.

“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”

Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be — promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.

Even the officials who run it, Mr. Salazar and the new director, Michael R. Bromwich, admit that they have a long way to go before government can provide the kind of rigorous oversight demanded by the complex, highly technical and deeply risky business of drilling for oil beneath the sea.

The blowout preventers in use today remain incapable of handling a well rupture of the force of the BP blast. The containment system developed by the industry to respond to another blowout has not been tested in real-life conditions and, by the industry’s own estimate, could still allow hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil to spew before a runaway well could be capped.

The seven-member commission named by President Obama to investigate the BP accident looked at the regulatory failures that contributed to it, and its conclusions were blunt.

“M.M.S. became an agency systematically lacking the resources, technical training or experience in petroleum engineering that is absolutely critical to ensuring that offshore drilling is being conducted in a safe and responsible manner,” the panel said in its final report, issued in January. “For a regulatory agency to fall so short of its essential safety mission is inexcusable.”

Many of those flaws remain, according to William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was one of two chairmen of the commission. He said last week that Mr. Bromwich was doing a creditable job, but that the agency still lacked the technical expertise needed to oversee such a specialized industry. “They changed the name, but all the people are the same,” Mr. Reilly said. “It’s embarrassing.”

The job of repairing the agency has fallen to Mr. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department inspector general who was pressured into leading the agency by Mr. Obama. While defending the employees of the agency, Mr. Bromwich, who took over last June, made no excuses for its past misbehavior, including a scandal at the Denver office that involved agency officials and oil company employees having sex and sharing drugs.

Mr. Bromwich acknowledged that accident rates for offshore drilling were several times higher in the United States than in Australia, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, in part because those countries imposed effective new rules after major accidents.

After the Deepwater Horizon spill, the regulatory agency was broken into parts, dividing the revenue collection office from the oversight division to eliminate conflicts of interest. A series of new rules involving well design, spill response and environmental review were imposed. Permitting and production were set back months while the industry absorbed the changes.

But Mr. Bromwich says his agency still lacks the resources, personnel, training, technology, enforcement tools, regulations and legislation it needs to do its job properly. He lays a large part of the blame on insufficient financing.

The bureau’s budget has been basically flat since it was created in 1982, even as drilling activity in the deep-water gulf has drastically increased and the technology has grown more complicated.

“Without more resources, we can keep doing what we’re doing, but we can’t grow,” Mr. Bromwich said in an interview during a recruiting trip to nine West Coast universities, where he was trying to lure young scientists and engineers to apply for relatively low-paying government jobs. “We need more people, and we need new people.”

Mr. Bromwich has asked the Office of Personnel Management to adjust pay schedules so his office can compete with oil companies, which in some cases are paying twice the government salary for petroleum engineers. Mr. Obama has asked for an increase of more than $100 million to the agency’s roughly $250 million annual budget. Congress provided about half that amount in the short-term budget deal reached last week, but discussions have not begun on next year’s budget.