One day back in the early 1980s, I was strolling along the beach near Port Aransas when I stopped at a ranger station to read the daily log of what sea life could be spotted in the Texas surf.

The handwritten log listed an engaging number of oddities — starfish, sand dollars, jellyfish . . . and some animal called a “tar ball.” I’d never heard of such creatures, so I asked a ranger on duty what they were.

He looked at me incredulously.

“They’re a ball of tar that rolls up on the beach . . . you know, a tar ball.”

It was then I learned just how precariously we Texans who love the sea, seafood, deep-sea fishing, sea turtles and all the other wonders of the Gulf co-exist with Big Oil — and how we were just one big disaster from rethinking the liberal license we give offshore oil producers. They’re among the assorted reasons we have tar balls on the beach.

The sprawling oil slick that’s been floating about the Gulf for 38 days hasn’t struck us here in Texas yet, but it’s begun coating parts of the Louisiana coastline, probably decimating forever its fragile ecosystem of salt marshes and the economy dependent on it. Experts say it may hit our beaches in the form of sticky tar balls in a few weeks — just long enough for us all to ponder the incredible failures we’ve witnessed.

For starters, who in the U.S. government came up with the bright idea of giving cash bonuses to federal regulators for approving more offshore oil leases quicker when the same agency was supposed to be carefully sizing up each operation for the threat it posed to our marine wildlife? Didn’t this all seem more than a little contradictory?

Not till now, it seems.

The Washington Post has now uncovered scores of documents showing that the U.S. Minerals Management Service for years altered documents and ignored marine scientists on its own staff in a mad rush to approve more and more rigs, bypassing legal requirements meant to protect the Gulf upon which everything from tourism to fisheries are dependent.

Fiscal hawks ought to be outraged about this, particularly during the George W. Bush era, a time of skyrocketing deficits, two wars and a new entitlement program.

As for oversight problems on the Obama watch, did no one at MMS have the good sense to pause when a moratorium on any further offshore drilling leases or waivers was ordered after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig eruption that sent millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf?

Even after the moratorium, at least several environmental waivers and drilling permits were issued. Unfortunately, the president didn’t really explain this incongruity at his press conference Thursday. When is a moratorium not a moratorium? Answer: when the president orders one.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and some parish leaders are hopping mad at federal agencies dragging their collective feet on the approval of sand berms to stop the oil slick, plus stalled delivery of equipment to scoop up crude oil. You’d think White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel would be on the phone, having one of his legendary fits, angrily screaming at some bureaucrat holding things up: “Do you know how stupid you’re making us all look!?”

In the midst of grand failures of competency, integrity and leadership, our leaders both past and present, Republican and Democrat, always want us to believe that just one more layer of bureaucracy would have solved whatever crisis just went by unaddressed. And thus our government grows and grows, only to become more lumbering, its agencies often working at cross purposes — if working at all.

Maybe it’s time to conduct a real housecleaning of all departments, not expand them. Cutting off some bureaucratic heads might be a good start. The White House reportedly forced out MMS director Elizabeth Birnbaum on Thursday, but it’s going to take more than that to overhaul the myopic culture that brought us the Katrina debacle in 2005-2006 and now the BP disaster.

As for the indolent and the incompetent still on staff at MMS, I say send them to the broiling Louisiana marshes. Compel them to clean up the muck their agency’s years of inefficiencies allowed to happen.

And if they quit, they’d be doing everybody a big favor.