![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Growth of EPA
Q: You mention that huge inertia. The Agency has grown to around 20,000 people now.
MR. COSTLE: A lot of that growth has been in the Superfund program, and I think that EPA made a mistake in thinking that so much of that program had to be run out of Washington. That just defies logic. I remember being told when I first came to EPA that there were 10,000 sand and gravel pits on the Mississippi River, every one of them an actual or potential point source of pollution. The average time it takes EPA to litigate a case is four years. You could tie up everybody at EPA for four years cleaning up the pits on the River. And you wouldn't even get to the 20,000 sources of air pollution. If you think of all the things you couldn't be doing, that immediately gives you a sense of proportion, a scale. You could never get the job done if litigating was your approach. You had to get a high voluntary compliance rate, and you had to leverage your resources.
So we had an interest in promoting strong state agencies that could carry a lion's share of that load. That would double or triple the resources out there. But with all said and done, even if we were spectacularly successful at building the institutional framework and enlisting state agencies, we still could not put a cop on every corner. We had to begin thinking about other ways to get this job done more creatively. We had to make it in everybody's interest to do it. This would potentially unleash tremendous amounts of imagination and energy.
We found that, time after time, once EPA made a decision, industry would respond with imaginative ideas. During the energy crisis, for instance, just in terms of energy conservation, it was amazing how much was done, and it turned out not to be that burdensome. The high risk in any similar situation is that we may let such windows of opportunity go by for lack of political will. Right now, we may not follow up on the report of the President's Council on Sustainable Development and make the changes in public policy that will put us in a different place five or ten years out. Instead we'll continue to let things drift, and that, I think, is an enemy to progress.
Another danger is that we'll trivialize EPA and diminish the Agency in a fashion that makes its work very tough. I've never felt that EPA's job was impossible. While the literal way some of the early statutes were written made some particular tasks impossible, if EPA is given the ability to be adaptive and flexible, it can define the job so that the goals can be achieved. EPA has to be creative, and that's very hard when you've got to keep remembering your purpose is to drain the swamp, even while the alligators are snapping at your tail.