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Frustrations
Q: What were the most frustrating aspects of being the EPA Administrator?
MR. REILLY: There are certain endemic problems that EPA Administrators cope with. One is personnel. I know, going back to the beginning, the White House tends to scrutinize EPA personnel more than it looks at some other agencies. I was told directly by the Personnel Director in the Bush Administration that no personnel appointments attracted more lightning than mine at the White House. As a consequence, after I got my first round of people cleared, when a couple left, I was not able to get anyone cleared or proposed to the Senate again. I had the people I wanted in the jobs, so it didn't really matter much to me practically, but I thought it was unfortunate for the people I had in "Acting" status that they never were able to get formally confirmed as Presidential appointees by the Senate. I think that's really a consequence of the nature of the business at EPA. It's a hot spot. It doesn't reward the White House much, it seems to present many more problems, more abrasive encounters than good news. From a President's perspective, EPA is just not a " feel good" place.
The regulatory review process is a constant frustration for an EPA Administrator. On the one hand the Administrator has the authority to administer laws and to prescribe regulations. However, that is circumscribed by an Executive Order that requires OMB sign-off. That creates a situation in which the Agency is always explaining to the Congress why it is not taking an action that may be called for, on time, by a statute, while at the same time it is fighting on the other side with OMB or the Competitiveness Council or its equivalent - there always have been equivalents - to justify the economic impact of a regulation and get the thing out as the law requires. That involves constant negotiation and I suppose has proceeded more smoothly in other Administrations than it did in ours. We simply had an ideological chasm that divided me from the Budget Director, for example, and from the Vice President on these issues. President Bush had advertised that he wanted to be the environmental President; I thought that had certain consequences for the priority and aggressiveness with which we should carry out our functions. I got the impression from the White House that a number of people had regretted the commitment and thought it no longer binding any more than the "no new tax" pledge was taken seriously by some of them.
Those were the major frustrations. There were also some frustrations with Congress at times. I remember testifying once on the reauthorization of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, on which we had elected not to play because the Chief of Staff just didn't see anything in it for us, just didn't think we would succeed if we did. I gave my honest opinions about some of the proposals then pending before the Congress which would have significantly expanded the responsibilities of EPA for regulating hazardous waste, taking the amount of defined and regulated hazardous waste from under 300 million tons to over 11 billion tons as mining waste, for example, was added to the regulated mix. I opposed that and gave testimony that was taken as very conservative. I was conscious of the fact that, first of all, we were barely making any sense of the program we were administering. Secondly, I knew that the Appropriations Committees had no intention of giving us any more money. And, third, I considered that the risk posed by a lot of this waste did not warrant nationalizing the problem.
But, the reaction on the part of some friends in the Committee was to say, poor Bill, look what they're making him say up here. I realized then the degree to which my position, my capacity to speak and be believed had been compromised by the in-fighting that everyone knew was going on within the Administration. I could have been more effective on that and some other issues if there wasn't the sense that there was a war occurring behind my back.
That was not a new phenomenon with me. Other Administrators had had many more problems of the sort that I had, and yet, what was distinct about my situation was that my President was the environmental President. So, there was the added note of disappointment, if not perceived hypocrisy, in the reaction of some of the pro-environment people in the Congress. They just didn't see the policy conforming to the promise. That was a source of frustration and disappointment to me. It didn't need to be that way. We could have had a range of environmental legislative initiatives that addressed the water quality problem in imaginative new ways and that made sense economically. In fact, we could have achieved more reforms if our body language and our public presentation had been more forthcoming and aggressive, if we'd not created the impression of intense ambivalence about this area of public policy.