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EPA and Congress
Q: How would you assess your relationship to Congress?
MR. REILLY: I had a relationship with Congress that I thought was productive in some areas, certainly in the Senate more than in the House when you consider the controversiality of some of the things with which I was associated: the Clean Air Act Reauthorization, Wetlands Reform, Resource Conservation Recovery Act testimony, Superfund testimony. Those are very difficult issues and I thought the Senate Environment Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and then appearances before the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Labor Committee on the North American Free Trade Agreement - though there were rocky moments - by and large were congenial, respectful, and productive.
My relationships with the House were very good with the Waxman subcommittee, although obviously I was in the position very often of defending the Competitiveness Council or other things they despised. We had a professional relationship. I had a good working relationship with Henry Waxman and with the ranking Republican Norm Lent that survived a particularly difficult Clean Air hearing where they tried to position our Clean Air Act as unaggressive. I had a good relationship with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and with Ways and Means, which I testified before on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other House committees.
There was a great deal of tension in my relationship with Chairman Dingell that really dated almost from the beginning. I came from a sector, the organized environmental community, that he detested. I also had associates like Bill Rosenberg with whom he had a history, and not a good one. He simply didn't like the kind of environmental priority my appointment represented nor did he find the Clean Air Act, as we submitted it, a good bill. In the Waxman subcommittee of his committee it was pushed even farther in directions he didn't like and I think he considered we didn't help him enough in holding the line against some of the things he cared about, to protect the auto industry and manufacturing sector. We had different roles and I was probably less attentive and artful than some of my predecessors in managing the personal relationship with him - though I did try a number of times. He thought that I tilted towards the Senate on the Clean Air Act and I think I probably did because they returned my phone calls and didn't regularly go around me to the White House. I had conversations with Senator Chafee and Senator Mitchell and Senator Baucus throughout the deliberations, as I did with Congressman Waxman. But Mr. Dingell and I, and his staff, were less frequently in communication. He tended to call the White House when he had a problem with us on the Clean Air Act or with me. I didn't react well to that, either. I thought ultimately, looking at the Clean Air Act we got, that relationship worked satisfactorily for me, but it certainly left some scars.
You don't serve in a position like mine where you're not just custodial, where you're not just reactive, without making waves and without causing people to become angry from time to time. That's the nature of the job. There is very little that an EPA Administrator does that confers an unqualified good on somebody, at least of an immediate, perceptible sort. A decision to have a new NOx standard for automobiles obviously will help the public good, will improve the Chesapeake Bay as we get NOx deposition down, and improve our environment all around. But the immediate recipient of the problem and the entity that bears the cost is the auto industry, which is not going to look very favorably on that. That's true of virtually every decision. The EPA Administrator doesn't go around handing out funds for housing projects or developments or enhancing a national park or paying for airports or roads or clinics. We just have to accept that and hope that in spite of the contention and costs that are associated with EPA's decisions, the public at least trusts both the laws and the integrity of the people who administer them to take the right things into account. That is one reason I gave so much attention to communicating about what we were doing. I thought that was a real need, particularly coming on the heels of the Reagan Administration, which had a rocky start on the environment. I think it's true for any Administrator that sometimes one is tempted in Washington to spend a good deal of time in Congress. That, in my view, for the head of an agency, unless there is an immediate legislative issue pending, can be a mistake, can be a distraction. It's a very large country and the Congress is important, but the rest of the country needs attention too. This anxiety that Americans have about insiders, I think, is exacerbated by agency heads who don't get out and around the country to communicate, to pick up things that you only get when you see things first hand.
Once we had gotten the Clean Air Act through, frankly, my relationship with Congress was one of holding the line. We had no other major legislative objectives, I'm sorry to say, that we were able to further in the latter two years of the administration. If things had been different and we'd had a new Clean Water Act proposal, then we would have been spending more time on the Hill, but the opportunities were not there, at least from 1990 on, after signing the Clean Air Act. And, I think some in Congress felt neglected. They'd been disappointed. I recall when I testified on RCRA and essentially stonewalled and said we didn't have a legislative proposal and we thought the legislative proposal they were considering was bad, there was a lot of disappointment. Senator Baucus said he really would have liked to have the same relationship on RCRA reauthorization as we had on Clean Air. I also noticed that when I made some specific criticisms of his pending bill, there was more sadness than annoyance on that committee as they thought, look what poor Bill is now having to carry up here now and represent. In fact, they were my own views, but the White House by then had so engaged the environmental issue in a negative-seeming way it was more difficult to communicate a position that said, "You're going too far with this law," and to be believed.