BOEM is being merged with the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) into a new agency called the Marine Minerals Administration (MMA).
This move essentially undoes a major reform that followed the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. At that time, the former Minerals Management Service (MMS) was dismantled after investigators concluded that it had an inherent conflict of interest: the same agency was responsible for promoting offshore development while also enforcing safety and environmental regulations.
To address that problem, MMS was split into separate agencies. BOEM was tasked with planning offshore leasing and resource development, while BSEE was responsible for safety inspections and environmental enforcement. The goal was simple: regulators should not be simultaneously promoting offshore drilling and policing it.
By merging BOEM and BSEE back together, the Interior Department is effectively reversing that structural separation. Critics worry that combining development planning and enforcement once again could recreate the same pressures that existed before Deepwater Horizon, when regulators were expected to facilitate offshore development while also overseeing its risks.
The name of the new agency is also revealing. “Marine Minerals Administration” suggests that offshore oil and gas are only part of the picture. The administration appears to be positioning itself to expand development of a wider range of offshore resources, including energy infrastructure and seabed mineral extraction.
That direction aligns with the 2025 executive order “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” which calls for accelerating domestic access to minerals such as nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, titanium, and rare earth elements. These materials are considered strategically important for electronics, batteries, and defense technologies, and are currently dominated by global supply chains centered in China.
Seen in that context, the new agency structure may be less about bureaucratic efficiency and more about preparing the regulatory system for a significant expansion of offshore resource extraction, including deep-sea and seabed mineral mining.