Louisiana Rep. Jeff Landry tangled with a top Obama administration official today over the regulator’s plan to expand the government’s oversight of coastal drilling to include oil field service firms, rig suppliers and other offshore contractors.

At issue is a plan by the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to punish contractors that behave badly. The approach, first outlined by bureau director Michael Bromwich earlier this year, represents a big shift in the government’s treatment of contractors who work with oil companies offshore.

Historically, the federal offshore energy agency — previously known as the Minerals Management Service — has focused on leaseholders and operators. Other federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, separately regulate entities such as drilling rigs and their owners. The traditional system has the virtue of being clear-cut and straightforward, Bromwich said at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing today.

But the government also can’t turn its back on egregious behavior just because it’s by a rig owner, cement contractor or any other service firm, Bromwich said. “I just don’t think that is a responsible way to behave as a regulator.”

Landry, R-La., didn’t like the idea.

“I’m concerned about you wanting to extend your reach into these service contractors,” he told Bromwich.

Landry noted that drilling vessels already are regulated by the Coast Guard. And he insisted that contractors that behave badly will face repercussions from their customers and the public.

“Doesn’t it make sense . . . from a financial standpoint that you’d be able to regulate just the operator, so you could point the finger directly at the responsible party?” Landry asked. “And if the operator fails to oversee his contractors or service companies, then that’s the operator’s fault.”

Landry said that going after contractors would upset the traditional chain of command in the oil and gas industry, which puts operators at the very top.

“I get concerned when the federal government just wants to reach in” on more of our industry “when clearly the chain of the ecommand, especially in the oil and gas industry, is that the operator is the guy in charge,” Landry added.

But Bromwich outlined a scenario in which “a contractor or service company concealed all the bad things it was doing from the operator, and (that oil company) really had no way to know.”

“In that case,” he said, “it makes no sense to me that a regulator is going to decline to take action against the contractor.”

The plan has met resistance from other lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A House bill to fund the Interior Department during the 2012 fiscal year would bar the ocean energy bureau from spending any money to go after contractors unless it explained its authority to Congress. That stops short of an outright ban — but it does indicate some lawmakers’ skepticism.

Bromwich sought to quell some of that fear today.

“I know there’s a lot of concern . . . suggesting that this is going to be a revolution, that this is going to be the new dominant strain in our regulation,” Bromwich said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“We intend to go, in most cases, directly against the operator,” he added. But Bromwich said contractors could be the target of enforcement actions “in a select number of cases when the behavior by the contractor or the service company strikes us as extremely egregious and were going just against the operator strikes us as silly and misguided.”