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EPA and environmental groups
Q: How did your administration work with the environmental groups?
MR. COSTLE: Initially, we were cut a lot of slack from the environmental groups. I think they saw, not just an administrator but an administration that was pro-environment. President Carter had made environmental protection a campaign issue. He was perceived as an environmentally-minded President. As the administration wore on and it was clear that there were competing interests -- for instance, within the Council on Wage and Price Stability -- some environmentalists began to suspect that maybe the President's heart wasn't in it. They were wrong. His heart was there, always.
Just look at the record. It was the first administration that included genuine environmentalists in major roles. Public interest advocates served on the White House staff. Look at the highly visible political appointments, like David Hawkins and Tom Jorling, who were prominent environmentalists. For such reasons, the environmental groups initially gave us some leeway. They were smart about knowing how the game gets played. They realized that, especially with Congress, they had to counter opposing interests if we were all going to wind up in the right place. There was often a real tug of war on the Hill, and I think they did what they were expected to do. We did what we were expected to, and everything balanced suitably.
I believe we had a reputation for fundamental integrity with the environmental community. This not only served us well, but it also meant that we had allies when we got into a jam on issues like energy policy. There were occasions when they would sue us, knowing that they needed to litigate on one side of the issue, because our opponents were certainly arming to come in on the other. I think their leaders are often process experts. They understood their role in rulemaking and litigation and played it. They didn't expect us to do anything but play our role.
I don't think they ever distrusted our motives. We might disagree from time to time on means, but we weren't the enemy. We weren't necessarily going to do everything they wanted us to do, but they appreciated that EPA had people who had battle scars, who had proven their commitment to doing the right thing.
Q: And that even carried over to the proposal of the bubble, and compliance flexibility?
MR. COSTLE: They would often argue: "You must be crazy. Do you really think this is going to work? You're asking us to buy a pig in a poke." But it was an honest, forthright intellectual argument. I do think that, once the political tide turned and President Reagan took office, they were of no mind to brook any experiments.
I think it's probably going to take an administration and a Congress that are pro-environment to bring about any true EPA realignment. Only a discernibly pro-environment government will have the credibility to pull that off, because the level of discord and distrust and polarization now is so bitter that everybody has positions staked out, and careers staked to those positions. That makes it a very tough atmosphere in which to accomplish anything.
Even though we had disagreements with the environmental community on specifics, I believe the underlying relationship was one of trust and respect for each other's respective roles. That has not been the case more recently, and the community certainly had reason to be skeptical in the Reagan years. I think they were also honestly skeptical during the early Bush years. They saw the likes of John Sununu in office, and they felt the environment was not really important to President Bush.
There's a little of that with President Clinton. The environment is not really his issue. The $64 thousand question has always been: Has President Clinton the courage of Vice President Gore's convictions? The answer may be: If it's smart politics, yes. He proved this in staving off the 1994 Congress. For the first time in a long while, the environment became a wedge issue, because the Republicans tried to go to the other extreme. The fact is that it was the 1994 Congress that launched Clinton's bid for a second term. People forget that he came into his own 1996 convention at about 22 percent in the polls. Then the Republicans overreached, and suddenly the President looked like a good choice, especially to people who were worried about the economy. I think the radical Republicans made the President look like a centrist. It comes back to the basic model of American politics: The battle is not fought in the end zones; it's fought between the 40-yard lines. Politicians who forget that soon find that they're out of step and, ultimately, out of office.