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Agenda
Q: You talked about your agenda and you set ten goals or themes when you first came to the Agency. How did you come to choose those particular themes to concentrate on?
MR. REILLY: Well, some of them I thought were relatively obvious. I have a long history of promoting non-confrontational, consensus-building solutions to environmental problems. The time was right for that. The adversarial approach has been very costly to this country and to the extent that you can find ways that do not frustrate the fundamental objectives either of the regulated sector or the public-at-large and some of their interest groups, environmental organizations and others, that makes sense. Hence, my emphasis on voluntary programs, the incentives to pollution prevention, the safer pesticide initiative, the 33/50 program, Green Lights, the Environmental Leadership Program, and Design for Environment. All of those things that reward good behavior rather than simply punishing bad behavior were, I thought, the kind of things that Bush put me there to do. He mentioned my history as a conciliator and as someone who tries to build bridges across the divides when he swore me in.
The international agenda was something that mattered personally to me a great deal. I thought that the United States could be of enormous help to the rest of the world for very little outlay in an area where we led the world, at a time when other countries were beginning to address a backlog of environmental problems. So, that initiative seemed logical to me.
The elevation of ecology was something that I cared about and it was also a recommendation of the Science Advisory Board. I thought, frankly, that a major priority EPA had been conceived to uphold, of protecting the natural systems of the country, had been somewhat diminished, historically, in favor of protection of public health, and I wanted to restore that balance. Two Forks served that purpose very well. So did our national estuary program and our aggressiveness on wetlands and my proposal for a world convention on forests.
We increased the annual budget for regional areas - for the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, San Francisco Bay, the Gulf of Mexico - from $40 to $700 million plus. Our budget for wetlands went up very considerably. There were a number of reasons for that. One, frankly, was that people care about, even love, some of these places, the Chesapeake Bay or the Great Lakes. They don't love emissions controls or effluent limitations or reducing parts per million of benzene. It's very hard to communicate some of those things to the public as it is to the President. It's not so difficult to communicate what you're doing to protect the Chesapeake Bay and why that matters, even though it may all go to the same purpose.
Thinking in terms of special places forces you to integrate things, so it also served another one of my priorities, which was to promote cross-media attention to problems. I had become concerned that in the fragmented history and Congressional oversight structure of the Agency we had built walls between our treatment of air, water, waste, and the rest. We didn't have the authority to break down all those walls because the statutes are different, the traditions are different, the expectations and requirements of the laws are different, even the risk methodologies are different. But, some of those, by heaven, I thought we could break down. The risk assessment methodologies was one of them, and we did. We tried to get the same risk characterization for air as for waste as for pesticides, or at least to clarify when we weren't and why we weren't.
The environmental equity priority is one that responded to a growing concern that was very deeply held by a lot of poor people and a lot of minorities in our country - by people on the Indian reservations and in the urban ghettos and in some very poor rural communities. There is a sense, and it's true, that these people suffer more environmental assaults, on average, than those who live in affluent neighborhoods. To some degree, this is a consequence simply of purchasing power, and we can't protect against it entirely. The land values will be lower and so rents will be less in places where air pollution is more severe. But, to the extent that waste facilities really are sited where political clout is least, and where people are most powerless or have the least capacity to understand what they are getting, which has been true of some of the Indian reservations, I thought that was EPA's responsibility to get into, even though we didn't have location control authority in most of our laws. So, we took that on seriously and I think moved it forward.
The concept of applying risk to our laws was simply the outcome of a lot of thinking that had gone on and was popularized first by Bill Ruckelshaus, particularly, that we needed a language that was common to the Agency and would allow us to prioritize better than the kind of episodic political noise that accompanied the discovery of the Valley of the Drums or Love Canal and that typically set the agenda, and determined priorities. It was a necessary template, I think, to apply to environmental priority setting in the United States. It was also a good shield with which to defend the Agency when charges would come up that one or another of our responsibilities was not being kept, or some milestone was missed, if we could say we were attending to the important business as determined by the scientific community, based upon their assessment of comparative risk.
Our priorities complemented one another. They stood together. I've been pleased that they haven't been undone by my successor. Some of them have been renamed, but I think they are still going forward. I believe, I like to believe, at least, that we won the adherence of the professionals for those priorities, that we legitimized comparative risk assessment, and market-based programs like pollution-rights trading, and also the voluntary programs, on our watch.
We spent a lot of time thinking about total quality management (TQM) and how you improve service and morale, how you improve quality of regulation and of attention to the regulated sector, to clients, so to speak, in a service institution. There was a good deal of skepticism about that, but I think by the end we had made some in-roads. So many people had had TQM training and had begun to see that it's really just another name for common sense and respecting your peers and not duplicating effort, and delegating when you can, and not doing things more than once.
I remember we had one senior priority-setting meeting in Maryland where there was a revolt against my having laid on too many priorities. Linda Fisher told me a story not long ago of my smiling when this point was made to me by some hapless candidate who was chosen to come forward with the bad news - this is a case where I certainly didn't punish bad news, I just didn't believe it. I didn't really agree with it. In my remarks I said, "There will be more initiatives, this is not a custodial era in EPA's life. There have been such eras, but we enjoy a moment of opportunity that must be characterized by creativity and imaginative new ideas. Therefore, it makes sense for us to have these initiatives, and I don't promise there won't be more." Linda said, I put it less graciously in a note that she saw and that I had given to Gordon Binder, my Chief of Staff, when I left the room on that occasion. The note she saw, he showed her, read, "Kick ass and take names, Gordon, there will be more initiatives."
Well, I have always believed that the Agency has been strongest, most effective, also most exciting to work in when it was moving forward, when it had ideas, when it was making policy, when it was promoting and initiating and framing the debate and not reacting. That's what it seemed to me the times called for and we had an opportunity, however brief, to enjoy it. That's called rising to your moment.