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Initial perception of the Agency
Q: Before you came to EPA, what was your perception of the Agency?
MR. REILLY: You know, I didn't have a terribly good impression of EPA before I went there. I think that I had been exposed to two kinds of criticism. One is the stereotypical view held by much of the regulated sector, which views EPA as: excessively concerned about small risks; highly bureaucratic; ludicrously protective, sometimes; always overestimating threats to health; not very responsive to economic concerns; and very insensitive to cost-effectiveness. I shared some of that view. I think I partook also of the environmentalist critique of EPA, which is of a hide-bound, bureaucratic agency, deeply scarred by the Burford years, risk-averse, wrought up in its own systems in ways that cause decisions to take far longer than they should, unwilling to embrace finality - partly for reasons of bureaucratic anxiety that if you keep the decision going, you won't be subject to a nasty Congressional hearing or to criticism.
I had lunch one day a couple of weeks before I was sworn in as EPA Administrator with a veteran journalist, Guy Darst, an Associated Press reporter. He had been around forever and had covered a lot of agencies and said, "Well, you're going to the best."
"Really?" I said, "That's not the view on the street."
"EPA will make five decisions in the amount of time it would take Interior or Agriculture to make one, and they'd still screw it up. EPA is at the intersection of science and public policy and economics and health," he said, "and just has to keep turning out the decisions. There is no place to hide. That's the function and that has made the Agency very good at what it does. It's very sophisticated."
I must say, that was news to me at the time - that a very informed and quite objective observer would have that judgment. That's the judgment I took away from the agency-of a group of highly motivated professionals with a great deal of élan. One often hears people criticize that zeal and sometimes, I suppose, EPA may be guilty of having a bit much of it, but that's what makes it a joy to go to work there. It's one of those agencies where you get invigorated walking down the halls, not one where the adrenaline flows out your shoes after about 30 feet - and we certainly have those in the Federal establishment.
I remember a conversation with Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan one day. He was talking about the difficulty that the Secretary of the Interior has dealing with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Park Service. He said "You give them an order and you have the feeling they're not going to carry it out until they check with God. Whereas the Bureau of Reclamation, or the Bureau of Mines, salutes and performs." Then he laughed and he said, "Oh, for a moment I forgot who I was talking to. All you have is people who take their orders from God." You know what he means, and that's true. EPA is a place with a moral fervor that sometimes can be excessive. But, it is a place with commitment and, I think, a great degree of professionalism. I tried to broaden its perspective, somewhat, to make much more of economics, of prevention, of incentives rather than strictly holding people to account for doing bad. I encouraged it to think about how to motivate regulated industry, and about the whole larger world out there, the international environment, to which EPA can be so helpful.
EPA's prestige rises almost directly in proportion to the distance one gets from Washington. In the rest of the world, people do understand what many here at home don't, which is, EPA is the place you go to for information about the environment, for criteria documents, for health information, for the best science that we have on the health impact of pollutants, and the way to set standards, the best laboratory work on automobile pollution, and increasingly on a number of other issues like indoor air pollution. EPA has more experience with remediation of toxic contamination than any other agency in the world. These are all cutting-edge problems - they require so little, relatively, of the U.S. government to be deeply, lastingly helpful to South America, to Russia and Eastern Europe, to China and Taiwan.
I can recall having sent two or three people to Latvia to deal with a spill in a river that provided their drinking water - a spill of some stuff that the Russians dropped in the water inadvertently but hadn't bothered to warn the Latvians about, even though the age of Glasnost had dawned. The Latvians detected an unfamiliar odor and figured out they had a problem and did not want Russian experts. We sent some professionals and I heard later from the Latvian President that this was the most important American mission since Lindbergh's visit there.
We helped Mexico when they had the big gas explosion and fire in Guadalajara; we sent a team to help Morocco cope with a big oil spill; we did those things, and buried the costs in programs. Our professionals returned invigorated, were animated, energized by their encounter with a real need in another country whose environmental problems are so much more egregious than our own. Thus, involvement with helping others was very useful to the Agency and a very inexpensive way for the United States to express what is one of the most benign qualities of our culture, our environmental aspirations and experience.