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EPA and the Press
Q: How important is the press and the public to an EPA Administrator? You mentioned before that a few negative articles coming out on the Bush Administration in the Wall Street Journal had encouraged the President to take a different approach on matters. Are a few negative press articles an important gauge to an EPA Administrator on how he or she should develop policy? What role does that play in decision making and policy making?
MR. REILLY: Ordinarily, I don't think a negative article or two makes that much difference to a specific decision, but we all swim in the same sea. The level of public and Congressional confidence, the degree to which the White House begins to develop an impression that maybe somebody is off the track or is not serving the President well or is pursuing a different agenda does matter. It's more a cumulative thing than anything else.
There is no question that the ability to communicate what you're doing, in that it has to be mediated by the press, will have a lot of impact on how much you can do. I felt that from the beginning and gave a very high priority to communicating about our activity. I was also sensitive to the fact that I came to the Bush Administration as an outsider. I had no relationships of a political nature with any of the key personnel. I had scarcely known the President before he appointed me and, in that sense, lacked a constituency. My constituency had to be the country.
Environmental groups made clear in the Clean Air Act debate that they were not going to be a constituency, though they were generally constructive and positive towards me and helpful. They mattered less to the Administration as time went on and the Administration gave up on ever winning them over or cultivating them. But, the general good will of the public, the belief on the part of people, including the Congress, that we at EPA were doing the right thing and sometimes even beleaguered, standing up for principle, was very important to my continued capacity to do it.
I had the feeling that we had really succeeded to a substantial degree in improving understanding of some of what we were doing when I, having canceled most food uses of the pesticides known as EBDC, chose to put EBDC back into commerce a couple of years later after we got better data about its residue level on fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. EBDC was indisputably carcinogenic in very high doses, and there could have been a very nasty reaction to repermitting it. A lot of EPA staff were hunkered down preparing for the hurricane. A decision like that had not been made before. In announcing the cancellation of 50 or so food uses of EBDC, I had said that our data was worrisome but also incomplete, and I mentioned that there were some in the Agency who suspected that residues detected at harvest in the field would quickly evanesce, as fruits and vegetables were handled, time passed, and they were moved from the field to the dinner plate. If that proved true, I had said, I would go where the data went.
Well, I did do that. Better data was developed through an elaborate survey and I accepted it and reversed my position, thereby allowing the food uses. The press reaction was largely accepting and trusting, though reporters asked hard questions at the press conference and there were some environmentalists' criticisms. On the whole, given the precedent I was setting and the nature of sensitivity for something that was, after all, in very high quantities, a carcinogen, the reaction suggested a growth in maturity of understanding about scientific information and about the concept of negligible risk. I thought that reaction was a measure of the degree to which the press had become more knowledgeable since their experience with the Alar controversy. I think some people in the press thought they had been had and maybe had over-reacted to Alar and had panicked the country and harmed the apple growers unnecessarily. But that new sophistication didn't just happen.
I spent a lot of time with the press. I had been totally forthcoming about our risk assessments whenever I announced a regulation. I freely discussed our data on cancer deaths associated with a toxic, or costs and benefits of a regulation, etc. When I suspected that data would have to be subject to reconsideration, that it was necessarily flawed because we didn't have all the information, I acknowledged that, too. Whatever we had, I shared. The press developed a habit of asking for that information - how many cancer deaths are associated with X, Y, or Z pollutant; how many will you avert by this decision; how many are you accepting? Sometimes they would ask about the maximum exposed individual; cohorts that we were protecting to one in 10,000, one in 100,000, one in a million. I saw sophistication grow on the part of the press of an area that has to be conceded to be terribly complex.
My sense of the press is very positive. I think reporters have a very difficult job to do. I am amazed that sometimes I'll turn on the television and see a perfectly clear, straightforward chemical explanation of an extremely complicated process, such as stratospheric ozone depletion or climate change. I think the press is communicating about the environment better and better, although there are shortcomings and the people in the press will be the first to admit that they often don't have the training, whether scientific or economic, and often don't have the time, either. But, one thing they ought to have is enough time on the part of people in positions like the one I had or others around him to help them understand the issues, because ultimately if they don't understand them, the country won't either.