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EPA and environmental groups
Q: Why didn't environmental groups give you, one of their own, the support that you might have expected?
MR. REILLY: Environmental groups behaved towards me personally in a fairly generous way, a positive way. I was always conscious of the distinction many of them made between me and the White House or me and the Administration.
There were times when I regretted that I couldn't bring more support to the President when he was doing things they really should have liked. I particularly was disappointed at the reception to our Clean Air Act proposal by the Clean Air Coalition. Most members of that coalition acknowledged that Bush's was a very progressive bill, they had not expected a bill aimed at eliminating ten million tons of sulfur dioxides in the acid rain title, for example, even though that's what they had advocated, and that's what they got. They, nevertheless, for tactical reasons, in order to move the bill further in their direction on ozone reduction, chose to characterize the Administration bill as weak. For the better part of 18 months, the environmentalists' caricature set the terms of the debate. When the bill came out of the Senate Environment Committee, it was going to impose an annual burden on the economy, according to EPA and OMB calculations, of about $42 billion to $44 billion when it matured after 1999. That was unreasonable, so we spent some months negotiating with Senator Mitchell, Senator Baucus, and others to pare that back and did finally, with the great help, particularly, of Senator Mitchell. We got the annual, end-state annual costs down to about $22 billion to $24 billion, no small amount. I remember the League of Conservation Voters scored all the key votes trimming the expense of the bill and they penalized Senator Chafee, Senator Baucus, Senator Mitchell and other people who worked things out with us. The Senators, who negotiated cost reductions not only important to the Administration but also vitally necessary to ensure enactment by the full Senate, saw their environmental ratings plummet as vote after vote on the Environment Committee's bill was scored against them. The Senators who saw their previously outstanding environmental ratings drop to 50 or even below included several of the Senate's environmental champions.
That experience showed that environmentalists were out of touch. It showed that they had allowed their ideology to run away with them. Also, the habit of negativism, of reflexive antipathy that had characterized their relationship with the Reagan-Bush Administration unfortunately carried over to the Bush Administration, even though our initiatives, particularly during the first couple of years, were strong - on legislative initiatives like clean air and food safety most notably; in the farm bill; on budget outlays; and on important regulatory calls such as my veto of the Two Forks Dam. But, environmental groups did not credit or acknowledge most of those strong environmental initiatives. (They were, however, very supportive of my Two Forks Dam decision.) The reasons for that are complex. I think habit really explains some of it. Vice President Bush had been a part of the Reagan Administration and there was a lot of distrust of the continuing figures and faces who survived and who were important in our Administration. Environmentalists clearly understood that the President had made appointments designed to "tilt" one way at the Interior Department and another way at EPA, and they saw very little change at Interior from the Reagan era, although the budget for land acquisition at Interior was much higher under Bush.
There was the body language of Chief of Staff Sununu and Budget Director Darman, which was unfailingly skeptical about environmental initiatives and unnecessarily provocative to environmentalists. It pointed up an ideological division even when there wasn't a substantive conflict, between me and EPA and the White House. The White House, particularly, was highly ineffective in its public relations in dealing with the environment. It was as though they were ambivalent about wanting credit. On the one hand they resented when the Administration was criticized by environmentalists, but on the other hand they didn't want to claim too much for our environmental initiatives lest they upset the business community and the more conservative elements of the constituency. The White House simply never resolved how it wished to present itself on the environment.
Finally, I think the President and his advisors decided that politically the environmental issue was too costly and was not working for the Administration. There was too little positive coming back for all the initiatives we were making. The Summit of the leaders of the industrial countries in Paris in June of 1989 was the greenest Summit ever held and we, the United States, were responsible for it being green. I was the only environment Minister who was there accompanying a head of state, and yet the environmental community used that occasion to complain that we hadn't set targets for CO2 reduction. I can still recall the sour expression on President Bush's face when a reporter at the final press conference in the garden behind the U.S. Ambassador's Residence questioned his saying that the meeting had made important strides on the environment. "That's not what environmentalists are saying," she pointed out.
The President decided, probably against his better judgment and instinct, to close off most of the California coast to new oil and gas development and part of the environmental community hit him for it. The Sierra Club criticized Bush because his moratorium was not permanent but only for the remaining years of the decade.
That's the kind of stuff that we dealt with constantly. There is no doubt in my mind that political partisanship played a role in the positions of many of the activist organizations. In fact, a majority of the staff at most of the activist environmental groups are Democrats and the culture of these groups is Democratic. That is true even for the more moderate ones, like World Wildlife Fund. Many staffers from the organized environmental community, in fact, have gone into the Clinton Administration. Activist environmentalists display great skepticism about Republicans as the party of business and they perceive Republicans as less prone to regulate than Democrats. They are less willing to be as generous or as tolerant toward a Republican Administration as they are toward a Democratic Administration. However, I can recall that President Carter and his Press Secretary, Jody Powell, had their conflicts with environmentalists: there is a newspaper headline I once showed our EPA staff - "White House to EPA, Shut Up or Quit." It was, in fact, from a press conference that Jody Powell had conducted. So one doesn't want to make too much of the partisanship of environmentalists. Elements of the Carter White House fell to calling environmentalists "1000 percenters," people whom you could never please. But I thought we deserved better of the environmental community, particularly in the first couple of years, than we got. In fact, it hurt the environment and it hurt our capacity to make further initiatives in the latter part of the Administration that the rewards had been so few in the first part.