On June 21st, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Minerals Management Service, the agency tasked with overseeing offshore drilling operations, was being reorganized into three separate divisions and renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. He also named a new director for the Bureau, former Inspector General for the Justice Department Michael Bromwich. The MMS, a little known agency until the recent disaster, was targeted for a major overhaul by President Obama and Secretary Salazar when the cozy relationship between the regulators at MMS and the oil industry came to light.

Mr. Bromwich will be responsible for implementing and overseeing the reorganization of MMS into the three parts that Secretary Salazar announced last month. The three divisions will independently be responsible for overseeing offshore energy development, enforce safety and environmental protections and collect revenues from oil and natural gas development. The point of separating the three agencies is to avoid any conflicts of interest. Secretary Salazar is on record as saying, "These three missions- energy development, enforcement and revenue collecting- are conflicting missions and must be separated."

In addition to the three divisions previously announced by Secretary Salazar, Mr. Bromwich told a Senate panel on Wednesday that he would create an investigative unit to root out corruption in the agency and help speed up the reorganization process. The investigative team will report directly to Mr. Bromwich and they will work in tandem with the Interior Department's inspector general's office. Mr. Bromwich decided to organize this team because he saw a gap in the agency's abilities. He stated to the panel, "there is not that kind of investigative capability in my organization. I think it is vital to create it, both to investigate internal allegations of misconduct, and to pursue with aggressiveness and diligence allegations that the companies are not doing what they are supposed to do, violated terms of their leases or made false statements or misconduct to obtain those leases."