Deep Water: the Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling Page: 66
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National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling
Watt and Reagan
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In January 1982, President Reagan's Interior Secretary, James Watt, created the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in support of his goal
to open unprecedented reaches of U.S. territorial waters to oil and gas exploration. MMS had a conflicting and ultimately disastrous mandate:
to both regulate offshore energy leases and collect the revenue they generated.
Frank Johnston/The Washington Post via Getty Images
beyond state waters.60 Previously the law had provided only that states should receive
a "fair and equitable" portion of those revenues, an ambiguous standard that invited
disagreement between the federal and state governments concerning what that portion
should be.
The Gulf of Mexico's still-more-special status. The distinction first drawn in the 1978
Act between offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in other parts of the nation was
widened further during the 1980s and 1990s. What began as a policy allowing offshore
drilling in the Gulf under a more relaxed regulatory regime than applied elsewhere
gradually became a policy of allowing offshore drilling, as a practical matter, almost only
in the Gulf.
Court challenges quickly greeted Secretary Watt's efforts to expand offshore leasing
throughout the United States. But decisively, Congress, not court rulings, ended the
Secretary's plan and effectively singled out the Gulf for offshore drilling. In a series of
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National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (U.S.). Deep Water: the Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, book, January 2011; Washington, D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc123527/m1/82/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.