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Thoughts on abolition of CEQ
Q: CEQ has played a predominant role in protecting areas, at least geographically - by focusing people's attention on ecological management in these areas through NEPA, using environmental impact statements, and that sort of thing. You have no doubt heard the Clinton Administration wants to abolish CEQ, set up a smaller office in the White House and then transfer - depending on which day you listen, I guess - those functions into EPA. What's your opinion on that?
MR. REILLY: This nation and this government so badly needs systems that integrate a variety of policy concerns that different agencies have that I consider it a profound mistake to eliminate CEQ. Many of us worked for years to try to get an understanding of the need to have better coordination for environmental protection, which after all involves your reaching out to Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, HUD, and other agencies. CEQ can do that; that's its very modus operendi. That's the concept under which it was established. EPA can try to do it and has to do it sometimes, but as one more agency, and not even a cabinet agency at that, it's a little more difficult.
There is a provision of the Clean Air Act, Section 309, that gives EPA the right to involve itself and make judgments about other agencies' conduct and behavior. It's not a very popular thing when EPA does it. And yet, an agency in the White House that both has cross-cutting responsibilities as part of its charter and also is free of the day-to-day administration of the laws to look long-term is, I think, a very important asset to Presidents who want to use it.
The problem CEQ has had is that Presidents have neglected it. It's not been given the kind of role that it might have, unfortunately. The Bush Administration chose not to put into CEQ some of the major environmental issues that in the Nixon Administration would have been lodged there, such as the coordination of wetlands policy. To have given that kind of issue, essentially, to the Competitiveness Council, in my view, fore-ordained the kind of acrimony, ideology, and conflict that we encountered.
It's not sufficient simply to set up a CEQ and assume that it will have the kind of influence that the statute contemplates. The head of the agency has to have a relationship with the President, has to be able to influence other White House officials, and has to be deferred to by the President in a way that suggests that they are to be taken seriously. But if you have that, and we certainly had it in the Nixon Administration and also, I think, in the Carter Administration with the kind of work that was done on The Year 2000 Report, whether one agrees with the conclusions or not, that is a classic achievement of a White House council charged with taking the long view and looking beyond the turf of any one agency. With CEQ gone, where is long term forecasting to be done?
I don't think that moving some of those functions directly into the White House into the domestic policy council or the domestic staff of the President is a sufficient or reassuring replacement for CEQ. They will be more political. They will be more subject to other pressures directly in the White House. They will be more episodic in their capacity to identify issues and characterize them and focus attention on them as they do or do not get a priority from the President. Even in the time when it might be in the desert, so to speak, as an Agency in the eyes of the Chief of Staff or the President, CEQ nevertheless has its NEPA responsibilities, its statutory functions, its responsibility to report on environmental conditions and trends, its interagency coordination role - which in our administration it tried to exercise with respect to water contracts, for example, and, I thought, made a contribution. I don't believe it's a good idea to eliminate CEQ and transfer the NEPA oversight functions to EPA.
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