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EPA's relationship with natural resource based agencies
Q: With regard to the idea of cross-cutting and maybe EPA not being quite the place to do that in government, how would you characterize, during your Administration, the Agency's relationship with other natural resource based agencies in the government - Agriculture Department, Interior Department, and the various bureaus beneath them?
MR. REILLY: We had excellent relations with the two agencies that EPA ordinarily conflicted with, the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture, particularly during the first two years of the Administration.
The Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, Bob Page, was very sensitive to environmental concerns, courageous in the face of criticism he received from people in the White House and in Congress for taking wetlands protection responsibilities seriously, constructive in working with me and others concerned about wetlands. As a result, I thought we had a relatively contention-free period and were able to make some progress.
The same was true for the Agriculture Department under Secretary Yeutter. He and I, early on, worked on the Alar issue and both of us came to see that the pesticide law was flawed. What the Agriculture Department really wanted in the way of a new pesticide law was uniformity of application so that we wouldn't have 50 states going their own way setting different pesticide tolerance levels. I thought that a reasonable proposition, provided that you are dealing with chemicals you have registered recently - that have been subjected to all the modern scientific testing. So, I conceded that point in return for the Agriculture Department supporting me in getting a cleaner faster cancellation authority than existed under current law.
Presently, absent a very high standard of emergency, the EPA Administrator, after years of research and analysis, can start the process of removing a chemical from commerce. But, even after the decision is made at EPA and it goes out of the building, it is subjected to de novo administrative hearings and then, inevitably, judicial review all over again which can take 2, 4, 6 years. That is profoundly destructive of public trust and confidence in government when you realize that the cancellation decision is based on a considered judgment that the chemical causes a problem - it has carcinogens at a level that is intolerable. How then explain why you're allowing it to continue to be used? Yeutter understood that and so together we proposed pesticide law reform. We were not successful because, I think, in the absence of a decision overturning the Delaney clause, which since has occurred, the House Agriculture Committee, particularly, saw no urgency. It was not unhappy with the pesticide law. Conservatives did not want to increase EPA's cancellation authority, and liberals did not want to abandon the Delaney clause's zero carcinogen prescription for processed food in favor of a negligible risk standard, which we also were proposing, as the National Academy of Sciences had recommended.
One thing that triggered, I think, a readiness in the Bush Administration to support reform, was my own position after Alar that I would not again stand up and reassure the country that the food supply was safe when EPA had acted to remove a chemical, unless we could promptly get that chemical out of commerce. That was the position I, and many of my predecessors, had been put in after making a cancellation decision. I just said, "Next time, I won't do it."
Yeutter also embraced EPA and environmental concerns in the preparation of the 1990 Farm Bill. He was very clear with me early on. He had encountered an unprecedented amount of concern for the environment as he made the rounds of his Senate confirmation committee members and he said that was a big change since he had last been at USDA. He realized that our support for any farm bill would be important to him; it would matter to Senator Leahy, the Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and others. He said, in return for our giving that support, he was willing to pull EPA right into the process, have us as central participants, which we'd never been, in the evolution and development of the farm bill. As a result, we got the most environment-sensitive farm bill we'd ever had. So, our relationships were very good. They were not as good after Secretary Yeutter left. And then the recession began to hit and there was a greater concern for the politics of the environment, and a sense that the issue wasn't playing as well for the Administration as it might have.
Our relations with the Interior Department were, I think, on the whole, congenial. I got along personally with Secretary Lujan very well. We, as he often pointed out, had different constituencies and were responding to different groups, which he characterized as clients. I thought that the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Park Service relationships to EPA on wetlands and air pollution, respectively, were very successful and productive. In the evolution of the Clean Air Act, Secretary Lujan reflected a point of view of concern for coal contracts and for the developmental side of his brief, which, I think, the President and others fully understood he would in making him Interior Secretary. We all understood that and accepted that.
We did have a serious disagreement over the Endangered Species Act. I thought one could make a case for systemic reform of the Act but not for exempting application of the law on less than 2,000 acres of old-growth timber in Oregon, which was habitat for spotted owls. I thought the suspension of the Endangered Species Act for that small tract was purely symbolic and negatively symbolic. It was something that was not going to preserve or create any jobs and was unlikely to destroy any owls, it simply was firing for effect. I angered a number of people in the Administration, and probably Secretary Lujan, when I chose to be the only member of the team who voted against, in public, the suspension of the Act in that case. But, given the kinds of issues that EPA has, I thought our relations with other members of the cabinet were generally surprisingly cordial.
We fought very hard with the Energy Department on specific Clean Air Act implementation regulations and that received some publicity, some attention, and yet there was much less attention paid to the fact that I had an excellent relationship with Secretary Watkins, as did my staff on cleanup of Federal facilities - at least after we got over his anger at our criminal investigators having broken into Rocky Flats one night without having warned him. He and I agreed early on that he would support my proposal for a 10-million-ton sulfur dioxide reduction in the Clean Air Act in return for a concession he wanted, which was to grant an extra three-year extension for clean coal technology, which I did.
I thought, by and large, those relationships were probably less troubled than they had been in previous EPA Administrations - largely because the President had campaigned on the promise to be the environmental President and had shown by a number of decisions, early decisions, particularly, that he wanted the issues and me and EPA to be taken seriously. His coming to the Agency headquarters building, the first President who ever did, to swear me in was a very important gesture. It wasn't lost on anybody. The number of Senators, the number of members of Congress, the number of Ambassadors who were present, I'm sure, to some significant degree because the President, himself, was going to do the honors, helped us a great deal.