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Executive Branch Coordination
Q: You mentioned Vice President Quayle and the Competitiveness Council and [Richard] Darman at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and their less than environmental approach to matters within the White House. What is your assessment of the whole concept of regulating the regulator through OMB processes or through sort of an ad-hoc Council on Competitiveness?
MR. REILLY: There is a function that some White House Agency must play for the President of coordination and policing. It affects all agencies, or should. The fact is, the reach of EPA authority is such that it will affect energy policy, economic policy, development policy, housing policy, agricultural policy, and it would be unreasonable to expect that an EPA Administrator alone ought to be able to make those decisions.
Also, a President wants to have some focus, some clear direction, some unity in the way his Administration behaves and is perceived. It's necessary for those two purposes, then, to have a coordinating body. However, the coordinating body needs to respect the same principles that govern the Agency itself in making particular decisions.
I was continually amazed that the kinds of contacts and information that EPA was restricted in having, at least ex parte, other than on the record with notes taken and memoranda prepared and acknowledgments in the record, went on unconstrained by these rules all the time with people in the Executive Office of the President. It was not uncommon in my time to get back comments from the Office of Management and Budget or the Competitiveness Council that incorporated verbatim lobbyist documents that we had seen from trade associations three or four months before on particular matters of concern in legislative or regulatory policy. That had a very demoralizing effect on EPA. Finally, as this sort of thing came to the attention of Congressman Waxman and others, it resulted in unpleasant but very well publicized hearings.
The lack of transparency in that Executive Office process and the disregard for the regulatory procedures that we had built up, I thought, undermined our credibility. They certainly contributed to a great deal of criticism and suspicion. So, I think the function is necessary but it needs to be quite specifically circumscribed, respect procedures everyone understands, and not involve wholesale disregard for the kinds of constraints that affect a regulatory agency.