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Building an Agency
Participant in Earth Day, 1970. The event demonstrated widespread public concern for environmental health and permanence.
© Washington Post. Reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library
When sworn in as administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency on December 4, 1970, William D. Ruckelshaus shouldered the massive responsibility of organizing and leading the federal government's most recent effort to protect the American people from the effects of pollution. He approached his task with the optimism and high expectations of someone setting out on a new endeavor. By the end of his initial term in 1973, he could identify with Sisyphus--the ancient Corinthian king forever condemned to pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down just short of the top. Ruckelshaus and his successors experienced the sisyphus effect every time the American people demanded a healthy and beautiful environment, but expressed uncertainty about the extent to which the federal government should act to achieve those ends.
Nevertheless, Ruckelshaus urged his staff to move ahead "with the valuable work which is already underway. We cannot afford," he wrote in his first days in office, "even a slight pause in the ongoing efforts to preserve and improve our environment." 1 His workforce of more than 5,000 represented the bulk of the federal government's previous efforts to discover and regulate threats to the environmental health of the nation. The initial complement consisted of government employees who had staffed a host of environment-related programs housed in the departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Health, Education, and Welfare. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), Atomic Energy Commission and Federal Radiation Council also contributed to the initial EPA staff. At different times, many had been on opposite sides of ideological and environmental policy fences. For example, the Department of Agriculture's pesticide program often worked to thwart the efforts of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's pesticide program. Ruckelshaus hoped to turn the diversity of such a staff to his advantage.
Son of a prominent family of Indiana lawyers, Ruckelshaus stepped into the new agency with some environmental enforcement experience. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1960, he returned to Indiana, joined his father's firm, and was appointed deputy state attorney general. His tasks included acting as counsel to the Indiana Board of Health, and in this capacity, he used the courts to stop municipalities and industries from grossly polluting Indiana waterways. He worked with the department's Stream Pollution Board to this end. But, the board possessed limited resources and enforcement powers. Prior to Ruckelshaus's arrival, it used its resources in a very limited manner. He helped reshape the board's strategy. He traversed the state with Jerry Hansler, an assignee from the U.S. Public Health Service, collected samples and photographs from grossly polluted rivers, and then called the responsible polluters before the board. In spite of the governor's fear that pollution enforcement would drive industry from the state, these tactics succeeded largely because the industrial violations of state statutes were so flagrant. Concurrently, he helped draft the 1961 Indiana Air Pollution Control Act, a piece of legislation that along with his water enforcement experiences influenced his early pollution abatement strategy at EPA.
With this enforcement background--which convinced him that a centralized enforcement effort was all that was needed to implement pollution control laws fully--Administrator Ruckelshaus set out to establish his new agency's credibility in the mind of the public and the polluters. To do this, he struggled to develop concrete, attainable goals for the agency and to set up a workable organization focused on realizing those goals.
The complexity of these tasks shattered his hopes for instant pollution abatement. To organize an agency consisting of an array of offices from different and often competing departments proved daunting. The major ideologies that had historically vied for authority in American society--centralism and federalism--confronted EPA's organizational staff. Competing sectors of American society championed these ideologies. The military favored a highly centralized organizational structure. Military planners had long believed that that centralized decision-making enabled efficient and effective deployment of resources to meet mission objectives. The military's poor showing in Southeast Asia led other analysts to question this assumption. A variety of groups favored a decentralized, or federal, approach.
Federalism is the notion that the power of government should be distributed between the national government and state and municipal governments. Historically, arguments arose over how much power should be distributed, and they still do. During the late 1960s, people tired of the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam and big government programs emerging from Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" program and began advocating reducing the size and scope of the central government. Business groups supported this movement because they wanted the preponderance of regulatory power shifted to the states where they found it easier to outmaneuver or bully state officials into not enforcing regulations. Some environmentalists, who championed ecological regionalism, also supported administrative decentralization.
For the first few months, Ruckelshaus and his staff heard advice from many arenas. To many, the ecological ideology underlying environmental activism suggested an intermedium approach to pollution control. That is, instead of one branch of EPA focusing on water pollution, another on air, a third on solid waste, and so forth, regulators would look at the entire pollution problem and attempt to create a holistic solution. For example, regulators would seek solutions that would clean the air without further degrading water or land with extracted pollutants.
To this philosophical position, Alain Enthoven, a Defense Department organization analyst, contributed a realistic, mission-oriented approach that had been generally successful in the military bureaucracy. Enthoven suggested a radical departure from traditional, medium-oriented pollution control. By structuring EPA around functional objectives such as criteria setting research and development, and enforcement, the agency could best achieve its mission and at the same time operate with centralized efficiency. Office of Management and Budget staffers and consultants who had served the Ash Council--the work group largely responsible for EPA's creation--recognized the value of Enthoven's approach, but suggested that present realities called for a more moderate, incremental approach to organizing the agency. Consultant Douglas Costle, who had worked with the Ash Council and was later President Jimmy Carter's EPA administrator, played a prominent role in defining EPA's organizational strategy. While serving on the Ash Council, Costle had recognized the merits of the Enthoven approach, but also recognized that existing statutes imposed complex restrictions to integration and centralization. Sensing that Ruckelshaus desired fast action to promote a strong public image of EPA, he submitted plans that integrated the centralizing tendencies of the Enthoven proposals with the medium-specific approach virtually mandated by federal and state pollution control statutes and regulations. Drawing from the social diversity of the 1960s, Costle sought to mount the war on pollution by enlisting the traditional, compartmentalized approach of past pollution control efforts; the ecological ideology espoused by often countercultural environmentalists; and the logistical and organizational expertise of the defense establishment.
Drawing heavily on Costle's advice, Ruckelshaus settled on a tripartite reorganization strategy designed to make the agency more efficient by consolidating and streamlining its functions. During the first phase, he retained intact many old-line, medium-specific programs in order to preserve continuity of effort while his management and organization staff sorted through the chaos entailed by thrusting together the diverse and sometimes conflicting functions that comprised EPA (see Figure 1).
The first plan created three functional divisions headed by assistant administrators-planning and management, standards, enforcement and general counsel, and research and monitoring. The plan retained five program offices constructed along media and topical lines. Commissioners of water quality, air pollution, solid waste, pesticides, and radiation headed these. Figure 2 illustrates EPA's initial organization.
EPA's field organization bore the stamp of the Nixon administration's decentralization policy--''New Federalism." Each of its ten regional offices mirrored the organization of EPA headquarters. In theory, they would be more responsive to constituent needs as a result of their placement around the country. Moreover, their locations would infuse their analysis with a better understanding of regional problems and enable them to account for local priorities in enforcing pollution abatement statutes. Ruckelshaus expected the regional offices to act as the agency's cutting edge, using them to collect the pollution information by which headquarters set national criteria. In cases where major industries or municipalities refused to comply with the law, local officials would identify them, gather evidence, and refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. Ideally, the staff at EPA headquarters in Washington would ride on the shoulders of strong regional offices.
Ruckelshaus launched the second phase of his reorganization strategy late in April 1971. During the first five months of agency operations, the planning and management staff at headquarters had juggled the tasks of delegating initial responsibilities and preparing for the second restructuring. Phase two consolidated the five medium offices into two new entities headed by assistant administrators. The Office of Media Programs incorporated the water and air programs. The Office of Categorical Programs subsumed the separate pesticides, radiation and solid waste management offices. Again, each of the regional offices conformed to the change. Figure 3 illustrates the new relationships resulting from this restructuring.
The agency never implemented the third phase, which would have eliminated the medium-oriented program offices altogether. In the heat of the pollution enforcement battle, neither Ruckelshaus nor his successors had the time, resources, or even the inclination to restructure the agency along completely functional lines. Over time, as new environmental legislation or changing national priorities subtly modified the agency's mission, EPA's organizational tree continued to grow, but never beyond the confines of the second phase. Ruckelshaus realized that the organizational changes required to put Alain Enthoven's functional theories into effect would divert too much energy from performing the agency's broad, public mandate quickly and effectively. Hindsight suggests that not doing so doomed the agency to periodically rehashing the unsolvable functional versus medium specific organizational question in its efforts to accomplish its broad mission effectively and efficiently.
intermedium: EPA defines media as air, water, and land collectively. "Media" is the plural form of medium--a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect.
1. Administrator to EPA Staff, 4 Dec 1970, Memorandum, Administration and Management files, EPA Historical Collection.