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EPA effectiveness
Q: How did EPA gauge its effectiveness during your administration?
MR. COSTLE: In EPA's earliest years, the measure had necessarily been: get the policy out; get the rule out. Everyone assumed that assessment was getting done elsewhere. The focus was on fire-fighting, not on evaluation. In our turn, we had some healthy internal debates about how to measure performance. There were those who wanted to do so with various forms of bean counting. That can be helpful. It can be important to know that you only filed sixty percent of the cases this year that you did last year. But why? Such counting helps you to ask some of the right questions. But you can't really measure total performance that way, because mere counting may not be the relevant yardstick. Ultimately, of course, it's whether the air and water are cleaner, at a reasonable cost. But determining that is a long-term process, which demands its own set of measurement criteria.
At the time, however, I at least wanted to gather some anecdotes that would illustrate to people that many of the problems we were addressing were solvable. We developed a series of case studies in the water office that, while anecdotal, showed that indeed water quality was improving. That was important ammunition to have when we went to Congress.
Q: Why was it so difficult to convince the Agency that it needed to devote resources to gathering that kind of information?
MR. COSTLE: Several reasons. The pressure of immediate deadlines, the desire to focus on the future, perhaps an apprehension that investigation would uncover deficiencies. And, of course, the perceived drain on our scarce resources of time and money. But I still think that such evaluations would improve the performance of government. The purpose is not to say that so-and-so messed up, but to see -- if a program is not working -- why it isn't, and what can be done.
But there were any number of meetings and hearings that I just felt were wasted. Perhaps the most egregious example was the last appropriations hearing in the Senate that Senator Proxmire chaired. He opened by saying that we would cover EPA in an hour, and then spent fully a half-hour interrogating me about the amount of overtime that Bill Drayton's driver had. This overtime occurring, mind you, during the height of the budget season, when Bill was the Agency's point man negotiating with OMB. The Senator spent five minutes on a $400 million R&D budget. I was really irritated and told him, "This is ludicrous."