Meet the New Minerals Management Service

In a move reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration is cracking down on the Minerals Management Service…by changing the agency’s name.


The MMS has fallen into disrepute because, well, as E&ENews PM put it, “employees accepted gifts from oil and gas companies, participated in ‘a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity,’ and considered themselves exempt from federal ethics rules.” The “drug and sex abuse [occurred] both inside the program and ‘in consort with industry.’ ” The New York Times reports that MMS employees “viewed pornography at work and even considered themselves part of industry.” Yet this government agency somehow failed to prevent the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.


So the Obama administration is giving MMS a makeover. The agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service will hereafter be known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement.


That’s exactly how the Bush administration dealt with the unpopularity of the Health Care Financing Administration, the agency responsible for Medicare and Medicaid: by changing its name to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. With candor and humor — two scarce commodities in such circles — Bush’s HCFA/CMS administrator Tom Scully explained the rationale:

The health care market … is extremely muted and extremely screwed up and it’s largely because of my agency. For those of you who don’t follow CMS, which used to be called HCFA, we changed the name because it was so well loved. I always say it’s kind of like when Enron comes out of bankruptcy, they’ll probably change their name. So, HCFA—Secretary Thompson and I decided to confuse everybody. We changed the name to CMS for a couple of years so people wouldn’t realize we’re actually HCFA. So far, it’s worked reasonably well.

For more on the pervasive cozy relationship between big business and big government, read Tim Carney’s Obamanomics.


For even more candor and humor concerning Medicare, read David Hyman’s Medicare Meets Mephistopheles.