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Carter era at EPA
Q: What problems did you have with transition, going to EPA in a new administration, at a time of party change?
MR. COSTLE: I had an advantage in knowing the EPA players, Russ and Ruckelshaus, of course, and John Quarles, who was Acting Administrator, as well as the incumbent Assistant Administrators. I did not know the White House staff, the Jordans, Eizenstats, other Georgia people. The next layer down were largely from some very good Capitol Hill staffs, from Phil Hart's and Muskie's offices. The first thing I did was to see Bert Lance at OMB. OMB and EPA had been at perpetual loggerheads, largely because of the "Quality-of-Life" review set up by OMB. This process had meant, in effect, that everything EPA did had had to be cleared by OMB. I told Bert, "Congress has been placing more and more responsibility on EPA without giving additional resources. The administration did not allow it." With the help of Elliot Cutler, the new OMB assistant director for natural resources, and Kitty Schirmer, we worked out the first major increase in resources for EPA. It was a 15 or 20 percent jump in Carter's very first budget, a wonderful signal to the Agency and the public that environmental concerns were going to be taken seriously in this Administration.
I asked John Quarles about the Quality-of-Life review. He said, "It's awful. Why don't I just opt out and take the heat." John unilaterally stopped the review, with the collaboration of Elliot and Kitty.
President Carter had asked me to consider Barbara Blum as my Deputy. I wanted someone who could deal directly with his personal staff, based on long-standing relationships. EPA administrators rarely bring the President good news, but the White House is always being lobbied by everybody who is affected by the agency. When the Chairman of General Motors calls the White House, they take his call. So Barbara's appointment was good for us.
Ham said I could pick the Assistant Administrators. I probably had a freer hand than any administrator before or since. The overall result was that we had as strong a team as could have been recruited, then or now. It included Tom Jorling, who had written the Clean Water Act, and Dave Hawkins, one of the country's chief environmentalists, who was a specialist in Clean Air Act issues. I had already enlisted Bill Drayton, who had been working on EPA matters with the President's transition team.
For R&D (Research and Development), I decided to look hard inside, and tapped Steve Gage. He had been the EPA R&D representative who had served as liaison to the New England states at the time of the 1974 oil embargo, when proposals to site refineries on Long Island Sound had cropped up. He was very objective and thoughtful. He never winged it, but would say, "I don't know that answer; let me get it." We decided to beef up R&D, to introduce peer review, strengthen the outside Science Advisory Board, create research centers around the country, consolidate the EPA laboratories, and broaden the network of scientists the agency consulted.
By 1977, EPA was under a barrage of incoming mortar rounds. It was under a scientific assault that argued its standards were not solidly based. Some complained that the agency wasn't efficiently getting new programs out, others that it was ignoring the States. Industries were suing; every rulemaking got litigated. When I arrived, a stack of rules was sitting on my desk for signature. I told the agency's General Counsel that I wouldn't sign until I had read them, and he said, "You have no choice. You'll be in contempt of court." Eighty percent of those regulations were there because of either a legislative or court-ordered deadline. The remainder were largely negotiated, often to keep us out of court, or were rules that the parties had all agreed to. It was no wonder that EPA had acquired its reputation for lack of timeliness. The agency was suffering a bottleneck and had not gotten adequate new resources to handle the new laws passed every year.
Q: Some Administrators have used their Deputy as a sort of Mr. Inside. You chose to make Barbara Blum your White House contact.
MR. COSTLE: Barbara and I had agreed that we were going to rely on our very strong team of AAs (Assistant Administrators). She was very effective when we set up cross-agency teams to focus on complex issues. And she also handled a lot of the international work.
Q: Did you meet a lot of internal pressure or stymying to your program?
MR. COSTLE: No. Partly because there was a perception that the outside world was increasingly hostile toward EPA. There was reality behind the perception. Remember, the Nixon years had been years of budget impoundments, Quality-of-Life reviews, efforts to bottle up the agency. Pressure and frustration had been building. There was now a perception of a President and administration that would be sympathetic. People inside and outside the agency were looking for me to solve problems, to demonstrate to the Hill and elsewhere that we were attacking problems aggressively.