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Global political changes and EPA
Q: During your tenure, you saw radical, global political changes. What impacts do you think those global political changes had on EPA?
MR. REILLY: With the waning of the Cold War, the global political situation changed fundamentally while I was at EPA. In my view, it accelerated a process that was already underway of opening up a whole new world to the Agency - a world that desperately needed the experience of EPA, which is preeminent in its field internationally, a world that needed help in setting priorities, in gaining a sense of direction, that needed also, frankly, to learn from American mistakes, particularly since many of the societies most in need of help don't have the resources that the United States has.
We tried to respond to that by making the Agency available to Eastern European countries, and former Soviet countries. We set up the Budapest Center, which was an EPA proposal that I made to the Cabinet and the President before he went to Hungary - later known as the Bush Center. We worked with the World Bank, I made the rounds, to a degree, in fact, that I doubt any of my predecessors ever have, to the Inter-American Development Bank to try to foster debt-for-nature deals with Latin America, to a meeting with the President of Mexico on Debt for Nature, and to Brazil to meet with their Cabinet on a number of issues, particularly leading up to the Rio Conference. We had a very active international agenda and the President made clear that he thought environment, as a matter of foreign policy, was important, that we should attend to those issues. Secretary Baker was always friendly toward our being involved as well. There was a sense, I think - certainly I had it - of much heightened environmental possibility as a result of the waning of the Cold War, the freeing up of resources, the relief of tensions and anxieties, the ability finally to communicate honestly with our Russian counterparts, with whom we had had a bilateral agreement for 20 years but who had nevertheless withheld a lot of information. We made a real start toward exploiting that opportunity. In the process, we secured for the Agency a role that it had not had before. We had the President's support in this, and we experienced occasional tensions with the State Department - not unmanageable ones, but tensions nevertheless.
I hoped very much that in my time I would be able to institutionalize a high level of international activity and priority within the Agency by creating for the first time a Senate-confirmed Assistant Administrator for International Activities. I strengthened that staff, and moved its complement towards 100 staff members. I created environmental attaches in Paris at OECD and in Mexico with our embassy there, and we had plans to have attaches in Moscow and Tokyo, and I would have liked to have one each in China and perhaps Taiwan and South Korea and maybe Thailand. These latter are doing a great deal of environmental investing, and locating our people there could have served more than an environmental purpose, it could also have furthered the export of U.S. technologies in the area of pollution control in a time when billions are being spent by those countries.
We played a role in the development of the Enterprise for the Americas Program. The Debt for Nature concept was our idea. For each of the G-7 summits, of leaders of the seven major industrial nations, I briefed the President and Secretary of State on the environment. The President took me to his first G7 Summit in Paris - an unprecedented decision by him to have an environmental Minister with him, which no other head of government had ever done or has done since. All of this elevated our role, our profile. As I watch now the degree to which international environmental responsibilities have shifted to the State Department, I'm concerned that things that only EPA can do effectively, will not be done. The role of an EPA Administrator in dealing with environmental problems along the border, for example, cannot be assumed by a Commerce Secretary or even an Undersecretary of State. Should the question arise: "Are we adequately protected against cholera outbreaks?" or "What's causing these brain stem disorders at birth of some of these border children?", you're not going to have a Commerce Secretary or an Undersecretary of State taken seriously on those issues, no matter how good they are. That is something that EPA has the authority and competence to address and the country will want to hear from the EPA Administrator. It makes sense that EPA be in the driver's seat on the border plan, therefore. That's true of many other issues as well.
I think frankly that it would be healthy, and it's very healthy for the Agency itself, to encounter environmental problems in other countries because it lends a sense of perspective to our own problems and allows EPA professionals to recharge their batteries and to become reinvigorated and to recognize what they're doing, they're doing for the whole world. It's a noble enterprise and there's nothing that brings that home to people more memorably than to help another country figure out what to do about its waste problem, which is an order of magnitude greater than ours, or its air pollution problem which is actually killing people and causing lung disorders in front of you.
Another advantage it has, frankly, for an EPA Administrator, or at least had to the two Presidents whose Administrations I served, Nixon and Bush, is that it gives you something to talk to the President about. Now, there are those who say that Bill Clinton is different and maybe he is, but my experience is that you don't talk for too long about sewers or the Clean Air Act or Superfund and hold a President's interest. But, if you've just come back from a meeting with Mrs. Thatcher or you've had a long conversation with Helmut Kohl and you communicate that in a memorandum, you're likely to get invited over for a meeting or maybe even for lunch with the President and show up on the President's calendar. This being the city that it is, that is noticed and that will fortify you in other difficult battles with other agencies as your relationship with the President is respected. That may sound a somewhat narrow and self-serving kind of interest, but, in fact, it's part of the way the game is played and I think it will ever be so.
Finally, we now understand that many of the most important decisions affecting the future of America's environment will be made in Beijing, Delhi and Brasilia. Those countries' decisions regarding energy policy, or manufacture of ozone-depleting chemicals, or forest practices, we will want to influence. An internationally active and helpful and sophisticated EPA can do that.