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Congressional relations
Q: You certainly had some heavyweight Congressmen on your side, but you were then about to lose Senator Muskie, the environmental statesman who had been such an agency ally. How was your relationship with Congress?
MR. COSTLE: Personal interactions are important. My approach was to level with them. You want them to walk away from a meeting with the impression that they have dealt with somebody who is professional, thoughtful, who understands their problems. You have to invest time and energy. To a surprising extent, the enterprise is very personal.
Q: The '74 class in Congress was increasingly populistic. That tendency has only grown since that time. How did you handle the degree of populism and the sort of anti-bureaucratic tone that came in with it?
MR. COSTLE: You have to play straight. In the long run you gain by doing so. We worked very hard to build EPA's credibility. A regulatory agency cannot be partisan, and EPA had always had very strong bipartisan support. As the going got tougher, this was more and more important. Of course, we didn't win them all. We got beat up pretty good a couple of times on the Hill, and many times no amount of professionalism would have saved us. One example was the auto emissions issue. The auto industry was John Dingell's constituent, and he was going to protect it. But the caliber of our people, and the quality of the debate we tried to maintain, was such that we more than survived our watch.
That turned dramatically with Anne Burford and resulted in subsequent bipartisan legislation that put a straitjacket on EPA. In many ways, the agency lost its most important asset, its flexibility. That's why reforming EPA today is going to be tough. We are again in a polarized and very much more partisan environment. The notion of Congress giving the EPA Administrator flexibility to improvise is not popular. Congress today tends to specify detailed requirements without always knowing the consequences.
True, we never published a rule where we could honestly say we knew all the consequences in advance. But we always tried to build in enough flexibility so that we could use common sense in implementing down the line. For instance, we had to change the ozone standard. It had been based mainly on one study, which turned out to be flawed, but nobody wanted to touch the standard. The pressure from the Hill and environmental groups was extraordinary. Yet, I couldn't justify the standard on the evidence; it would have been more costly to our credibility. In the end, you govern by consensus. Every administrator is always going to be in the middle of a bull's eye and had better be concerned about credibility.