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Role of Regional Administrators
Q: You had to place a lot of trust in your regional administrators.
MR. COSTLE: Yes. I wanted strong regional administrators, a mix of career and outside people. And President Carter also agreed it was time to break the glass ceiling, so we carefully searched for women with experience and capacity. The regional offices were wonderful training grounds. And we moved Deputy Assistant Administrators around to get experience in other media programs and begin to see the agency more as a whole.
Turning attitudes around on the Hill really worried me, because the bitterness and anger that I ran into during my confirmation interviews were palpable. Remember, we were dealing with the post-Watergate Congress, with many new members without federal experience, many more subcommittees, and a somewhat hostile attitude toward the Executive Branch. And at that point, Congress was at a stalemate on amendments to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. I recruited our legislative director, Chuck Warren, from Senator Javits' staff. We prepared a chart of appearances before Congress by Russ Train and his AAs. Wherever we displayed it, everybody grasped the extent of the interactions between EPA and the Congress. These became much more extensive with the House's reorganization, when it seemed like every member chaired some subcommittee, with each drawing a bead on EPA.
The truth was that the Agency was still innovating and improvising. This would never stop with the signing of a particular bill or regulation. Our understanding of the nature and scale of environmental problems is so much more sophisticated today than it was then. We hit EPA right at the time when its learning curve was coming right up against the political resistance curve.
Q: How would you characterize the relations between the regions and headquarters?
MR. COSTLE: There's always an inherent tension. You want the regions to be close to the States, to give the day-to-day attention to state programs that headquarters can't. But if you just turn all ten regions loose, you'd have chaos. So you always need a balance between national guidelines and enough flexibility to meet the problems in the field. Our innovation of RA (Regional Administrator)/State Agreements -- which required fifty programmatic, across-the-board renegotiations each year -- gave us a chance to recognize individual differences and priorities. I repeat, there will always be a certain tension, but it's how well you mange it that is important.