July 10, 2026 — The catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster led to the splitting of the federal Marine Minerals Administration into two separate agencies – one focused on offshore leasing and production, and another on safety.
Now Democratic leaders in Congress are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s move to reunite the agencies’ functions under one roof.
The April 2010 well blowout and fire killed 11 platform workers, discharged an estimated 4.9 billion barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and was only declared sealed five months later in September 2010.
Economic and environmental damages from the disaster led a year later to the creation of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to handle offshore energy management, alongside the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).
In a July 8 letter to the Government Accountability Office, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., of the House Natural Resources Committee called for investigating the Department of the Interior’s proposal to recreate a unified Marine Minerals Administration.