![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Stagnation of EPA's legislative proposals
Q: What stalled EPA's legislative proposals?
MR. REILLY: I think certainly Governor Sununu and probably the President concluded that the Clean Air Act, which was a marvelously comprehensive and ambitious bill with a great deal of innovation, hadn't worked politically.
During the 18 months that bill was pending, we heard regularly how pusillanimous it was and how inconsequential it was and reactionary it was - all caricature, in fact, of the bill we forwarded to the Congress. As we costed it out, the bill would cost something between $17 billion and $22 billion per year when fully mature in terms of new added cost to the economy. The bill that was reported out by the Senate Environment Committee, we costed at $42 billion to $44 billion per year, and therefore we saw the need, as Senator Mitchell understood, to pare down that bill, to put it in the realm that we could support and justify for the health and other benefits we would get from it. We did succeed, we got it down to - I think it probably costed out at about $24 billion as it was finally passed. That's a big ticket. That, itself, is a measure of seriousness. Our bill, as we had proposed it, wasn't far from those costs. But during the long period when we were in negotiations to scale back the cost of the Senate Committee bill, we were criticized and positioned as naysayers.
Finally, when the bill was enacted and signed, Mr. Waxman said, "This bill is owing to the two Georges, George Bush and George Mitchell" - a generous thing for Henry Waxman to say, and it was the truth. Yet neither he nor anyone else on that side had said anything positive about the President's contribution for the better part of a year and a half. So, that was credit that was too late in coming. I think the White House decided environmentalists were not going to work with us, were not willing to give credit to us as they might have to a Democratic administration for an initiative of that magnitude, and we wouldn't do that again.
Certainly there was a sense, too, that those costs were very significant. We just got the bill signed when the economy began to show some of the first signs of distress. Dick Darman related those economic problems to the Clean Air Act. He never lost an opportunity to disparage it, to say the only possible conceivable reason for having done it was to gain a political advantage, but, in fact, it had not done even that. The failure of the Clean Air Act to work politically for us weakened my position in advocating new environmental initiatives. It reinforced the arguments of those who disdained environmental initiatives as likely to alienate traditional Republican interests without winning any new support from activist environmentalists.
So, from a political point of view, I think that the environment could have worked better for us if we'd had a more forthright response on the part of those who set the tone for the environmental debate, to a large degree the organized environmentalists, but also the press. In fact, Lee Atwater told me after I had been in office less than a year, that the country regarded us and the President as very serious about the environment. As he put it, "Our polls show that the country considers Bush an environmentalist, but he ain't nuts." Well, that's exactly where George Bush wanted to be.
So, we were succeeding in the longer term and, I think, had we been more careful with the rhetoric, had we not engaged in the fights on the specific, and many of them relatively trivial, regulatory issues, like the minor permit amendments, and then had we not had the big public wetlands fight, and had we positioned ourselves as leaders and not become isolated at the Rio Conference, we could have come into the 1992 elections as serious, responsible people who really had done a good job of integrating economic and environmental priorities. We could have achieved that reputation in spite of the activists' brickbats. But too many of the people around the President were only too ready to abandon the environmental standard and were reenforced by environmental groups' criticism.