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Congressional support and opposition
Q: Who became your friends in Congress? Who were your enemies?
MR. COSTLE: I can't say that I had personal friends, in the way that Russ did, for example. But I knew many people who were steadfast allies: Doug Waldron, from a Pennsylvania steel district, for instance. And people like Tim Wirth, from Colorado, and Toby Moffett from Connecticut, along with new and upcoming members of the Watergate class who were very much interested in environmental issues. I worked closely with many of them, trying to keep members like John Dingell from acting on some of their worse instincts.
And of course there were the statesmen, with whom you could forge a wonderful working relationship, stalwarts like Edmund Muskie and Howard Baker, and newer members like Patrick Leahy of Vermont. I'm afraid we're losing too many of those people now. That was a different time and a different Congress.
Q: Congressman Dingell has been a long-term opponent of the Agency, in many ways.
MR. COSTLE: Mainly on specific issues, such as automobiles. On many others, John Dingell has been a good public servant. But in running his committee, he tended to bully people, and I have never been willing to be bullied. So he and I often went head-to-head. But we got the public's business done, and overall, I think there was mutual respect.
Q: Who had the best staff?
MR. COSTLE: Senator Muskie always had good staff; so did Howard Baker. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, while Muskie and Baker were there, had one of the best staffs on Capitol Hill. On the House side, Paul Rogers had a good staff, as did Henry Waxman. The House Public Health Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee had some very good people. John Dingell did, too.
Q: What do you think makes a good Hill staff?
MR. COSTLE: First and foremost, I believe a lack of arrogance, a willingness to listen and learn, a recognition that no staff person can know it all. He or she has to know his/her piece of it, including the priorities of their principals. I think our people largely enjoyed working with the Hill staffs. For the most part, the AAs enjoyed working with the Members. We generally cultivated relations with them just as we did with the White House staff, realizing that the more we did so, the more trust people would have, and the more credibility we could muster in making tough calls.
The House Appropriations Committee provided our best opportunity to take all the Assistant Administrators up, go through the entire Agency budget, and show how the pieces fit together. You couldn't do that with any other House committee, because they were only concerned with pieces of this or that. We never had that opportunity with the Senate Appropriations Committee, which I thought was weaker. Proxmire was focused on his Golden Fleece awards; his style was interlocutor vs. witness, an arms-length approach that was highly scripted. He seemed to be pre-occupied with items like the use of cars. I'll never forget the time he spent twenty-five minutes tracing each time Bill Drayton used an agency car, and five minutes on the entire R&D budget.
I thought highly of Tom Foley, who then chaired the House Agriculture Committee. He told me straight out, "I can't help you much, because I've got a group of members on the committee that hate the Agency's guts, and there's nothing you or I can do about it. If you want to reason with them, I'll help you where I can, but I can't deliver the goods for you. I don't have the votes." So we always knew where we stood, and that was helpful.
The Senate side was better, partially because each Member's responsibilities covered more jurisdiction. A Senator as a rule had more diversity in his portfolio, and that often brought a broader perspective. Senator Muskie was one of the greatest, a real statesman.
Q: It seems like the multiple committee oversight arrangements in Congress really made it difficult for the Agency. Would it be politically possible to get congressional reform to create a select committee on the environment, so EPA would report to one super committee?
MR. COSTLE: That's probably not possible. The environment has real tracking power with the American public. If it's as important to the public as it consistently seems to be, given polling data, it will continue to be seen as a plus issue for a Congressional member to be involved with.
The Executive Branch cannot tell Congress how to organize itself. You have to make suggestions carefully, even when invited to do so. I can't foresee the political dynamics changing in a way that would lead individual members, or Congress as a whole, to cede power to any special committee and lose the leverage they now have.