A specific note in last night's presidential speech: the appointment of Michael Bromwich to head up the office of Mineral Management Services, the regulatory agency that bungled the oversight of the Deepwater Horizon rig before its collapse led to the spill in the Gulf. According to President Obama, Bromwich is a "a tough federal prosecutor and Inspector General. His charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog – not its partner."Bromwich may be in the right position to do that, at least compared to his predecessor -- now-resigned Elizabeth Birnbaum, who had relevant policy experience but did not seem to ha the bureaucratic acumen (or perhaps the mandate) to reform the MMS.
Bromwich, on the other hand, has experience coming into organizations and working to change them -- as an Inspector General at the Department of Justice, but especially as the court-appointed "Independent Monitor for the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police Department on use of force issues" and "Independent Investigator for the Houston Police Department Crime Lab." Both of those last jobs involve coming into a bureaucratic culture, assessing its failures, and instituting measures to fix problems. He also has the investigative acumen to look into the practices of BP and other oil firms to assign responsibility and prevent future disasters.
Bromwich will fail, however, if Interior Secretary Ken Salazar doesn't support his efforts -- if the new MMS director steps on industry toes and companies turn around to complain up the chain of command, little will get done. If Obama was serious about giving his new appointee free rein to overhaul the agency and its relationship with its charges, though, that's a good sign. I just wish he'd adopt that same rhetoric around financial reform and appoint more regulators to act as the "industry's watchdog -- not its partner."
-- Tim Fernholz
