The Trump administration is creating a new office that critics say could weaken the environmental oversight of oil drilling and seabed mining in territorial waters.
The new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, will be formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in an effort to increase environmental oversight of the energy industry and prevent future oil disasters. After the split, the Interior Department’s oil-leasing activities were separated from environmental regulation and financial management.
The move is “worrisome because it has the potential of bringing things back where they were, where there was this inherent conflict of interest between promotion of offshore oil and gas, and oversight safety,” according to Donald Boesch, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
At a Wednesday hearing on President Trump’s budget proposal for next year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that recombining the two offices would cut red tape that has held up new energy projects. “These unification efforts will streamline bureaucracy,” Mr. Burgum said.
The new office, part of the Interior Department, will oversee offshore oil and gas drilling, which the Trump administration has prioritized since taking office in 2025. It will also enact the president’s deep-sea mining agenda in national waters, and hold lease sales for mineral deposits found on the seabed areas in territorial waters.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 crew members on the rig, caused catastrophic damage to ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico and had lasting health and economic effects on coastal communities. Federal investigations after the disaster, including one that Dr. Boesch coauthored, found that the regulatory body at the time had become too close to the oil and gas industry it was supposed to oversee, and was structured in a way that prioritized energy development at the expense of safety and environmental concerns. The Obama administration later split it up into three bureaus to separate the conflicting interests.
In a statement, an Interior Department spokeswoman said the transition would not weaken environmental oversight or safety regulations.
The new bureau will also take on oversight of the Trump administration’s plans to lease waters in U.S. territories to deep-sea mining companies. The first of these sales, according to the spokeswoman for the Interior Department, are likely to happen next year.
The nascent industry seeks to harvest mineral deposits found in abundance across seabeds worldwide including rare earths, cobalt, iron, manganese, copper and other resources used in magnets, batteries, weapons and other technologies.
Seabed mining is environmentally controversial because of the risks to ocean ecosystems, and no company holds a commercial license to mine. Some 40 governments have called for a mining moratorium or ban.
Mr. Trump has made enabling the seabed mining industry a priority. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is considering approving a commercial license for companies that want to mine in international waters, despite objections from other countries.
The administration is also surveying national waters for critical mineral deposits and is considering opening the seafloor in territorial waters near Alaska, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands for the sale of mining leases.
Officials from Polynesian countries and territories have expressed concerns about the environmental effects of seabed mining in waters that are culturally and economically important. The leaders of American Samoa have imposed a seabed mining moratorium, and environmental groups and residents have protested and petitioned against the industry.
Elsewhere, the department’s mining proposal for Alaska is “really sweeping,” said Cooper Freeman, the Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit group. The leasable areas would overlap with pristine Arctic marine habitats as well as fisheries that Alaskan communities rely on, Mr. Freeman said.
The recent proposals to mine in national waters first came from Impossible Metals, a seabed-mining start-up. During the Biden administration, Impossible Metals requested a lease sale near American Samoa that was ultimately rejected. According to Elizabeth Klein, who was the director of the Interior Department office that made the decision at the time, the bureau felt that there was not yet enough scientific information about the deep ocean ecosystem to assess or regulate potential environmental damage and the government of American Samoa had not been sufficiently involved the process.
After the Trump administration took office, the company resubmitted its request and the government began a formal process to consider leasing.
Ms. Klein, who is now the director of domestic policy programs at Penn Washington, the University of Pennsylvania branch in the capital, said the newly created office at the Interior Department might not have the capacity to take on the difficulties of overseeing a new industry operating in distant territories in addition to its existing responsibilities.
The office’s staff and expertise was already insufficient to responsibly oversee deep sea mining, she said, and the staff reductions caused by extensive layoffs early in the Trump administration very likely make the situation worse. A new budget document indicates the department’s plans to reduce those numbers further as it creates the new bureau.
Maxine Joselow contributed reporting.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey covers climate and the environment for The Times.
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