![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Assessment of President Bush as the "Environmental President"
Q: You said that early on your relationship with the President was good. You know that he ran on the platform - on the slogan, anyway - of being the environmental President. Of course, the environmental press harpooned him for that later on. What is your assessment of President Bush as the "Environmental President" that he styled for himself in the campaign?
MR. REILLY: Looking back with as much objectivity as I can muster, he kept his promise. You typically judge a President according to three measures on an issue like the environment: new initiatives, for which the Clean Air Act must stand as a milestone - progressive, genuine response to the problem, something that really will get most of the cities in the country into attainment within the next ten years. Budget commitments - the President raised the operating budget of EPA 54 percent and the budget overall about 45 percent at a time when he didn't do that for other agencies. He was equally generous with the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the environmental components of the Interior Department budget. He increased waste clean-up funds in the Energy and Defense Departments by several orders of magnitude. Enforcement is the third area. If a President is trimming or an Administration not on the level with the environment, enforcement is where you'll see it. We set records for having put more people in jail for environmental crimes on our watch than in the whole previous history of the Agency. We also assessed more fines than in the previous 18-year history of the Agency.
We vastly increased the settlements under the Superfund Law precisely because we were enforcing the hell out of that law. Finally lawyers counseling Corporations changed the advice they were giving to their client companies and said, "You better settle with these people, they're coming after you." I took 500 people out of one part of the program and put them into enforcement precisely to create that effect and it worked. We ended up cleaning up Superfund sites at the rate of one a week, which was meteoric compared to the previous history of that program.
I think that you have to credit the President, who also supported me on the Two Forks Dam - it was difficult for him to do, it wasn't easy. He saw food safety legislation go up to Congress that was anathema to the House Agriculture Committee - it never went anywhere because of that, but was nevertheless progressive and needed. Some of the international initiatives, like the Forest for the Future program and the President's proposal at the 1990 Houston G-7 Summit of a forest convention. Those are very significant measures, as are the three new marine sanctuaries, the nearly 3,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers he established, 6.5 million acres of wilderness, 52, I think, new wildlife refuges, and 20-some parks. From an environmental perspective, this was a very vigorous Administration.
The decision to close down the California coast to further oil and gas development was very difficult for President Bush as an oil man who believed that the technology was there and that society's needs had to be met with more oil. These were important moves that should have worked better for him politically. They didn't work well for him politically because there was an ambivalent, kind of conflicted, body language that we communicated.
I think Governor Sununu and Dick Darman were, more than anyone else - later Quayle and the Competitiveness Council - responsible for that. It muddied the waters. They failed to communicate a consistent environmentalism. In fact, they seemed to be constantly skeptical about things environmental in their remarks to the press and in their speeches. We were, and were perceived as, a divided Administration, but our thrust was very environmental, particularly for the first two years. When it didn't work for the President, and he began to be challenged from the Right, and we also had economic problems, the President distanced himself from his environmental record. He came to accept the Quayle, Sununu, Darman view that there was no constituency for the environment that offered him anything politically, and no public incentive or encouragement to stay on the issue. Even for the Clean Air Act, he only got credit from environmental group spokesmen after it was passed. For the 18 months it took to get it passed, we took daily drubbings in the press because one part of it or another wasn't to their liking or wasn't sufficiently "strong." They later acknowledged it was a significant law. Henry Waxman said it was owed to the two Georges, George Bush and George Mitchell. But, that was a brief moment of glory in a long tough slog. By then Sununu was aggressively negative on anything environmental. Environmentalists had particularly vilified him as negative on the issue and he was open in his contempt for them.
I think the environmental community failed to behave in a way that rewarded environmental good conduct and thereby made a strategic mistake. I cannot say with certainty that things would have come out differently, particularly in Rio and on the international front had they played the President differently, but I think they might have. Environmental groups simply created no rewards and there were significant penalties out there in the form of both the bad press they were generating and impatience on the part of the traditional Republican constituency - of farmers' concerns about wetlands and businessmens' concerns about regulation - that weren't offset by compensating new support or encouragement.