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EPA policy development
Q: Who helped you craft those more flexible kinds of plans?
MR. COSTLE: Bill Drayton and his staff served as the intellectual sparkplug. Not that they could develop it full-blown out of a seashell; they had to work with the air and water people. Bill's job, in part, was to challenge.
In EPA's early days, the intellectual power was in the program offices. Gradually, it had become concentrated in the policy-planning shop. I wanted very strong AAs who could regenerate the original capabilities. But I told them, too, that while I wanted strong program offices, I was also going to have this other shop that was going to be just as tough. Out of that, we'd get a better, healthier debate.
It worked that way. It meant it was rougher for the AAs because they sometimes had to battle vigorously with their colleagues. But I was fortunate enough to be able to have Jodie Bernstein, our General Counsel, act as mediator for a lot of the debating.
Another trend that had crept into the Agency during its first years was that the lawyers had become a dominating influence. There was a tendency in the different legal shops to meddle in policy choices instead of hewing to roles as lawyers. I told them, "You're welcome in the policy debate, but you're lawyers first of all. You need to be the best, because we'll be forced to litigate every time we turn the corner. But I'm not going to let you take over the policy process." So we tried very hard to strengthen the media programs and to develop a very good economics and policy shop.
Q: As you crafted these policies that relied less on command-and-control, how did the environmental community respond?
MR. COSTLE: They were nervous and skeptical. But there was really nobody who would argue with Dave Hawkins' or Tom Jorling's environmental credentials.
The environmentalists are not always totally right. They are advocates. If you are a public administrator, your job is to balance legitimate competing interests. Overall, you're an advocate for the environment, but your decisions have got to be informed by a multiplicity of perspectives, within the confines of the law. Flexibility in the law can be an administrator's greatest friend -- the lack, his greatest enemy.
So the environmentalists knew their role was to advocate. They knew that General Motors and the steel industry were in there making their case with all the lawyering and science they could buy. But I think the environmentalists had been very clever in influencing Congress in drafting the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. They knew they could never match the resources of industry in research and dollars, so they put much of their focus on the process of rulemaking, and access to that process, in order to advocate.
In the end, though, neither the environmental nor the business community is accountable for results. The Agency is, and the Agency has to respect the facts and the law.