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Potential organizational change
Q: How do you change course with all that built-up inertia? How do you reorient this system in what is a fairly short amount of time, four years?
MR. COSTLE: You've got to start with a vision. You have to give clear leadership signals to people. Some creative thinking about redefining the organic statutory base of EPA is probably necessary. That's a tall order, but it's not as if people haven't been thinking about it. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences has done some studies on EPA. There is a group of former administrators working on that now, through the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Unfortunately, today is not the most hospitable political environment in which to have a serious discussion about EPA. Not surprisingly, the environmentalists don't really want to play a part; they're struggling just to hang on to what they've got. They want to be persuaded that anything that's different is going to be better, not worse. So they are very skeptical. However, we've got to think these issues through, because at some point we have to assume the political climate will be more neutral, and there will be bipartisan interest. We cannot wait for another major crisis to force it to happen. There will be a rational reception for policy changes and statutory changes, and the agency has to be a part of that.
Q: Do you think reorganization is worth the downtime?
MR. COSTLE: You pay a price, and you have to be prepared to do so. If you do your homework in advance, so that you really know how it's going to function, it can be a real asset. But you have to go about it in a very sensible way. Politically, it can lead to a lot of downtime, because it's not as if you operate in a vacuum. If you were the head of General Electric, you might have some internal squabbling over certain turf issues, over moving this division or changing that one. But you don't have a Congress and 300 public and industry groups to respond to. You also don't have an open political process where interests can all run to the Congress or the President to thwart what you're trying to do. If you try anything that is too radical a departure, somebody is going to introduce legislation to block it, and then you will find your time and energy diverted for an age.
Q: Is this something that you should hold off until the last two years of an administration?
MR. COSTLE: When it comes to dealing with the iron triangle -- the Hill, the lobbyists, and the internal agency turf issues -- I'm not sure that it makes much difference when you do it. In some ways, you probably have a more tolerant Congress early on than later. As time goes by, the Congress will always think, "Well, we may have a new team down there, and we'll just hold things as they are until we can deal with new people."
I still believe that functionality would be a logical way to organize the agency, but Congress has frustrated that. And there is a high price to be paid in downtime, in trying to reorganize. But there are other ways to get the Agency to think in new ways and, eventually, you may be able to pull that off. You can form crosscutting committees to undertake functional efforts. For instance, by consolidating enforcement, at least you know that, at a very important point in the implementation of the laws, the air and the water people have to work together. Sometimes the lawyers are more likely to do that than the engineers.
Over the years, EPA has built up expertise in various industrial categories as the engineers have broadened their outlook. If their assignment is to do mass balance analysis for a process, rather than simply look at what comes out of a particular pipe, they become much more sensitive to the overlaps and interlocking nature of the problems. There is where the crosscutting needs to take place, not necessarily on the bureaucratic end. Eventually, the bureaucratic boxes should follow the thought process, but you've got to have a willing Congress, a willing environmental community, and a willing industrial community for that to happen. It's amazing how quickly industry, for instance, builds up a vested interest in the status quo in their relations with a regulatory agency. They know who the players are and where to go to influence the process. Thus, there's a lot of resistance to any kind of major reorganization or overhaul.
And you do pay a price in confusion and downtime if you don't approach it very, very carefully, and get all these groups to buy into it. But in an atmosphere of perpetual crisis management, you rarely have the time to make that happen. Prior to taking the helm of the agency, I suppose it was a theoretical issue for me. But the reality was that Congress had loaded EPA up with too much to do, too tight timetables, and woefully inadequate resources. EPA was struggling just to respond. And as the laws were taking effect, the regulated community was going back to second-guess everything, to duck if they could, because big money was involved.
So the criticism had moved from "Do they really know what they're doing?" to "Of course, they don't." We had already had the early academic cry, "The goals of the Congress were wrong: 'fishable, swimmable' will bankrupt the country." But nobody had the data on that, one way or the other. I happen to think that Senator Muskie and Senator Baker and Representative Rogers knew exactly what they were doing in enacting those Herculean goals. They recognized that we had a huge inertia to overcome, and this was the way to start. Modification could come later.
In 1977, in Congress and in the environmental community, there was clearly a perception that, while the laws had been on the books, they had never really been implemented. This was not a criticism of Bill Ruckelshaus or Russ Train. Congress liked and respected both of those men. Perhaps Members weren't sure they trusted the bureaucracy, but they knew Bill and Russ were responsible, thoughtful administrators. Instead, the Congressional advocates of EPA, the people who had been the spark plug for the laws that had been enacted, believed that the Agency had been throttled by OMB and the White House, and that the time had come to let the Agency do its work. And by then, the Agency's industrial opponents had lost their initial battles in court. And even in the instances where they had succeeded in delaying, there was now a new administration, and a new administrator, to deal with. So the opposition once again geared up its 16-inch guns, blazing away about how environmental protection would bankrupt industry and kill the country's economy. The noise was such that Congress obviously had to listen. The steel industry, in particular, was getting all their allies worked up. If it hadn't been for the steelworkers, for the unions, the Congress would probably have rolled over, because the steel caucus claimed to be convinced that we were going to put the U.S. industry out of business.
A major conception underlying the job of EPA Administrator is that you are the person who must make balanced, reasonable judgments, whose actions can be defended as consistent with the laws. You have to move the ball forward; the environment has to become cleaner as a result of the Agency's actions. But you are not allowed, in our system of checks and balances, to be arbitrary or capricious. By definition, the Agency and the administrator are on the side of the environment. That's the mission. In that sense, you are an advocate. But at the same time, you are in the position of a judge; you're a public official whose job is to ensure the laws are fairly and effectively administered.
At that time, from the Congress' point of view, the sense that the existing laws had to be evenhandedly implemented before they could be judged or amended was very ingrained. I remember vividly how strongly Senator Muskie felt that the statutes had not been appropriately implemented. Until then, he maintained, we should not be seeking changes in them. And there were also those in the academic community who criticized EPA's effectiveness from an ivory tower perspective. They overlooked or ignored the real world: the political dynamics of Washington, the checks and balances between Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary. Nor did most of the critics consider the real-life difficulties facing the States, which were the front-line implementors of the programs. The most vexing problems in the early months of my tenure were not in the Agency, but on the Hill. I was spending almost 50 percent of my time there because, given a new administrator and the frustrations they had experienced with the Agency in the past, there were any number of Congressional members who wanted to get me up there on record. In addition, I was relatively unknown to many of them, and they wanted to see me personally. So command performances on the Hill took up a big chunk of time, and I became increasingly frustrated myself each time I traveled there, wondering how I would ever get on top of the paper flow and into the rulemaking process itself, so I wouldn't become simply a rubber stamp at the end of the line.
And, of course, I was trying to do all of this while I was recruiting my management team. That recruitment is probably the single most important thing that you do as administrator. You must get your team in place early on, because you can't do it all. If everything has to come to you, you become the absolute bottleneck.