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Hank Habicht
Q: How did you and Hank Habicht carve out your respective roles as Administrator and Deputy?
MR. REILLY: We came to a working understanding early on that on certain issues, I would be very personally involved - certain issues that either I cared about particularly or that would not be moveable to the same degree absent the Administrator. Those issues included the Clean Air Act and controversial regulations, the Two Forks Dam decision, the Exxon Valdez and follow-up, wetlands regulation, our international activities, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and, I suppose, our food safety initiative.
There was nothing, however, that Hank was discouraged from getting into. I particularly encouraged him to get into the whole area of risk characterization and systematizing the way that we assessed risk within the Agency. He, himself, picked up on the management issue and became a prophet of total quality management. He saw the things that I was not doing and was quick to pick up on them.
He and I met regularly - sometimes in meetings we set and lunches that we tried to hold fairly frequently, weekly or bi-weekly; other times just before our early staff meeting in the morning or after it, or in the course of the day. My door was always open to Hank. He just freely came and went. There was nothing that we couldn't talk about. He also had a very good sense of when to do something on his own, and when to tell me he was going to do it, and what those things were that he could act on with his own initiative and just tell me after the fact. He knew my philosophy and what I cared about. I thought we had one of the most congenial Administrator-Deputy relationships I had ever seen. That owes a great deal to his sensitivity, too.
I traveled a great deal, I probably traveled a third of my time. I think my predecessor told me he averaged one day a week out of the office; I probably averaged two. Hank was quick to pick up the loose ends that necessarily got left and generally make sure that our agenda was moving forward. He made sure the initiatives that he knew I cared about were getting a proper degree of attention and priority-that the White House was being mollified or snags that came along were addressed.
It was a very easy relationship. We saw the world, I think, quite similarly - the needs of the Agency, both the importance of protecting its regulatory integrity, of restoring to some degree its public image, of really strengthening internal morale, which had not been great throughout the 1980s, and of leading some reforms to introduce more science and economics into Agency thinking. He had had more experience than I with the programs, having been Assistant Attorney General, and so often knew more about specific issues than I did but was always very modest and unassuming about his knowledge. I think in retrospect, he was a very astute observer of what I was not doing and was quick to pick up on it and do it. In some cases I encouraged him to take on certain things, in other cases he just recognized that they needed doing and did them. It was, fundamentally, a relationship built on a lot of mutual respect.