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Significant accomplishments
Q: You mentioned before an ideological chasm between yourself and the Budget Director, etc. I suppose historians will look at OMB and EPA's relationship at some point in time and make judgments along those lines. As you know, you've studied history yourself, those will go in cyclical arrangements. But, on what grounds do you think historians should judge your tenure at EPA? What do you think were your most significant accomplishments as Administrator and what do you think were your biggest failures?
MR. REILLY: I think the most significant accomplishments were - somewhat in chronological order, I suppose - first, the elevation of ecology and the signaling of the end to expensive and wasteful water development in the West, which I think is the message of the veto of Two Forks Dam. Second, the elevation of science in the Agency that came with the decision to commission the Science Advisory Board to do its report and then to give so much attention and play and priority to see to it that its message was heard. It began to affect policy. Third, the enforcement vigor on my watch, which was unprecedented in the number of referrals to the Justice Department for civil action and criminal cases we filed. We assessed more fines during my four years than in the entire previous 18-year history of the Agency. And we put more people in jail for egregious, willful environmental crimes than in the previous history of EPA.
Fourth, I would cite the effort to integrate environmental policy with our foreign policy, which we began very early, as early as the March 1989 delegation that I headed to Mrs. Thatcher's conference on the ozone layer, in which then Senator Gore was a Delegation member. The constant publicity we gave to the stratospheric ozone issue as a representative, emblematic problem, and the Treaty amendments we negotiated phasing out ozone-depleting substances by 1995. Here the world economy was acting over many years in a way that was disturbing the fundamental life support system of the whole planet without any knowledge of the consequences of our actions. And then we began to address and correct that problem internationally - in the only way we could, in cooperation and concert with other nations. We, at EPA, tried to influence the lending policies of AID, the training of the Peace Corps, which we began to undertake, the economic policies of the Treasury Department relative to the World Bank, and I introduced President Bush to the concept of Debt for Nature, and we succeeded in making it a major component of the "Enterprise for the Americas Initiative" that the President proposed for reform of trade, debt, and environmental policies in Latin America. One of the great environmental challenges and dramas of our time is the highly contaminated state of the former communist countries. EPA played the key role in thinking through those problems, and in setting priorities in conjunction with the World Bank to help address them. We proposed the establishment of the Budapest Center to take a regional approach toward Eastern Europe's environmental problems and then provided a Program Director from our staff.
I think we laid the groundwork for a solid climate treaty. In my view, the United States could have committed to stabilize greenhouse gases and that would not have impinged on our economic success. If anything, it would have spurred us to identify more energy conservation opportunities, which is good for our balance of trade and our overall environmental health in the United States. But, the climate treaty itself is a good basis for moving forward and if we have to, as the science comes in, to tighten the goals as time goes on, making them more concrete and specific. Finally, I take some pride in the proposal by President Bush for a World Forest Convention, which was an idea I first broached to Chancellor Kohl of Germany prior to the Summit of Industrial Countries in Houston in 1990. I asked his Environment Minister, Klaus Toepfer, if Germany would refrain from pressing Bush on greenhouse gas stabilization commitments in return for the President's proposing a Convention on Forests. A German Government official close to Kohl had said to me, when I tried out the idea, that the Chancellor felt strongly about climate but that he was crazy about trees. The G7 leaders committed to the Forest Convention and we worked hard to achieve it in Rio. The Principles of Forestry that the world community did agree to at Rio is a long way from a Convention on Forestry, but it does lay the foundation for the Convention and one day it will come into being.
I believe we made considerable progress in cleaning up hazardous waste dumps, and perhaps more important, in laying out the considerations that should underlie the reauthorization of hazardous waste laws when the time would come to revisit those flawed statutes. Within six months of taking office we redirected Superfund, emphasizing enforcement first, and new technologies. As a result of the enforcement priority, lawyers for responsible parties began to advise their clients to settle. We had four years of record settlements, during which four-fifths of all private party contributions ever made to clean up Superfund sites were committed. And during our final year we were averaging one cleanup of a Superfund site every six days, or 65 in our last year. With the Reducing Risk report by the Science Advisory Board, and the Risk Characterization memo by Deputy Administrator Hank Habicht, we laid the foundation for a thorough overhaul of the Superfund program when the moment came for reauthorization. Guidance we issued directed Superfund managers to adjust remediation requirements to future land use, an important change necessary to reduce cleanup costs and return derelict properties to productive use.
I believe that we legitimized both the concept and use of risk assessment on our watch. More than half the states undertook their own comparative risk studies after we completed ours.
We also designed and demonstrated the value of market-based trading of pollutants in the acid rain title of our clean air bill, which is now law.
I believed very much that an excessively adversarial relationship had characterized government-industry relationships in the United States, and that it was impeding progress. The many voluntary, collaborative programs we launched, several like Green Lights and 33/50 which were very successful, responded to that concern. They began to inculcate in our professionals a more sophisticated understanding of the possibilities open to them, the sense that they could, without compromising their aggressive enforcement responsibilities, pursue cooperative ventures with serious companies and sometimes solve problems faster and more efficiently.
I think, looking back, the thing that I am proudest of is the fact that the country, the Congress, and certainly the President, thought we were on the level. We were honest people who had a sense of the direction that we should go in and that the country should go in, and we were competent and could be trusted. It's very important when you exercise the kind of power that we had at EPA that you have credibility and that people - even smart and involved people cannot take the time to learn your metier - believe that you're taking the right things into account, and you have their interests at heart. I think, by and large, our public reputation was consistent with that idea. If there were those who thought from time to time that we were too vigorous or perhaps not aggressive enough, they nevertheless believed that we were serious. That is probably the thing that I am the proudest of because I think it's what EPA most needed in my time.
In terms of my major failures and disappointments, I think that the Rio Conference has to stand out as the principal one. I can recall getting up as Head of Delegation to deliver the speech for the United States in Rio and my heart just sinking as I moved toward the platform. It was clear to me that this should have been the high point of America's environmental performance and leadership in the world. We, after all, were the country that had done more to put the issue on the map, to think it through, to develop environmental impact assessment, push clean air, establish freedom of information and community right to know about toxic releases, and advance pollution rights trading, and so many of the cutting edge concepts of our time. No other country had reduced its pollution levels so much, or restored water bodies as we had. Virtually all the environment Ministers in Rio knew that. Nevertheless, America was on the defensive, isolated, criticized.
For me, personally, it ought to have been the high point of my career, and here I was heading the delegation which was widely seen as the malefactor. The Financial Times of London reported my first press conference in Rio with my photograph under the headline, "Arrival of the Archfiend in Rio." They then gave a quite positive, sympathetic characterization of my performance, but were unsparing in their presentation of the world community's negative, even hostile, attitude toward the United States. The Administration's failure to commit the United States to stabilization of greenhouse gases in the climate treaty, and then its abysmal oversight of the negotiation of the biodiversity convention left us alone and beleaguered at Rio. The Administration was not sufficiently unified to make sure that the Convention on Biological Diversity was well-crafted and was one that we could embrace. Had we been with the rest of the world on those issues we could have led on many others at and prior to Rio.
I regret that I didn't get more consistent and vigorous support from the White House in an area where I really had the President's interests at heart. The President was personally very attentive and kind to me and my wife - and so was Mrs. Bush. All of his public comments and many private observations that got back to me were enthusiastically supportive of what I was doing. Yet, during the fourth year, particularly, he came down on the side of the Chief of Staff or the Budget Director or the Vice President on some of the major divisive issues between EPA and the White House and undercut his very good environmental record and made decisions, such as those affecting the climate treaty, that I thought made very little sense politically or economically.
I think his image as a master of foreign policy actually suffered at Rio in ways that perhaps some of his advisors had never conceived - largely because they just didn't take the environment very seriously and they didn't think the world would, either. I remember the Budget Director said that our stonewalling and isolation at Rio would generate one, at the most two, days of negative press. Well, it was at least 14 days of worldwide press exposure and criticism. From an environmental point of review, we simply didn't recover from it and it became impossible to get the environmental record, which is a very strong record in the Bush Administration, before the public and the country.
That wasn't necessary. I don't think that the conservatives in this country required it. I don't think it really helped with that wing of the Republican Party, and it hurt very seriously with others who wanted to see the United States constructively engaged with these problems - not necessarily doing extreme things about them, but certainly working in concert with other nations to solve these problems, and ideally, leading other nations.
My other disappointments are related to that. The constant bickering, fighting, with the White House distracted us from some initiatives that we could otherwise have undertaken. We could have engaged in much more productive debates about the reauthorization of RCRA, formulated our own concept, lobbied it aggressively as we did the Clean Air Act, and finally gotten rid of some of the dumber things in that law, had we retained our credibility.
One has to respect the fact that we had not just a divided Administration but we had a divided government. I don't think anything we could have done would have won Cabinet status for the Agency. The Democratic leadership in the House simply was not going to permit that on Bush's watch. Some, in fact, have admitted it since. Some, like Senator Mitchell in the Senate were large, generous, and thought that the Agency belonged in the Cabinet and were prepared to bury any partisanship to put it there. We never got the same kind of generous outlook in the House. There were some long-term critics of the Agency like Dingell who even in a Democratic Administration won't support putting EPA in the Cabinet, but might conceivably be willing to defer to a President of their own party on something he felt strongly about. So, I regret not getting Cabinet status but I don't think there was much I could have done to achieve that.
I regret not getting a new headquarters building. This is one of the frustrations that my predecessors and I all suffered through. EPA Headquarters was a sick building! The very idea has a Woody Allen ring to it. I never imagined that five years after I took office I would look back and see that Congress has yet to approve our building and relocation plan. I succeeded in getting the Administration to agree to assign to EPA the best building to come on the market on Pennsylvania Avenue since the Depression, as Senator Moynihan reminded me, congratulating me that the President supported my position. But, I could never get Eleanor Holmes Norton to sign off and she blocked approval of EPA as the tenant by the House Public Works Subcommittee on Buildings because, as she said at the time, she thought that building too worthwhile to have people in it making decisions about sewers.
I would have liked to have a more productive relationship with a couple of key members of Congress, but actually the reasons for the animosities felt by some members had to do with our aggressive advocacy of clean air and our vigorous lobbying of the Clean Air bill that they found loathsome. So that's not a failure, really, it's simply a consequence of making choices and being active, which I'm proud of. Overall, my relations with the Congress were quite good.
Food safety legislation would have been good to get. It was needed, but we couldn't get the liberals to give up the Delaney clause, or the conservatives to agree to strengthen EPA's cancellation authorities, so we reached an impasse. Now with the decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturning the Agency's interpretation of the Delaney clause, there will have to be food safety legislation. Our setback will have proved to be temporary.
I cared a lot about the Convention on World Forestry and got the President to propose that at the Houston summit in 1991 with some of the G-7 industrialized countries. We did not succeed in getting the developing nations to agree to a convention, though we did get a Statement of Principles on Forestry, which I negotiated for the United States in Rio. Ultimately that will prove much more valuable than the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was almost too easy to get the developing countries to agree to because it asked so little of them. The Convention on Forestry could make a very substantial difference to the conservation of a very large amount of flora and fauna that live in the forests of the world, particularly in the tropical forests. That's something for the longer term and I hope the Clinton Administration gives it a priority.
I suppose it's come as a surprise to some that EPA was so heavily engaged in that issue. Well, I really did see the Agency as the Environmental Protection Agency, rather than as the air, water, and waste regulator of the United States. I saw my role as the chief figure in the field of environment in the Administration. Certainly the Agriculture Department had little interest in the Convention on World Forestry or the Statement of Principles on Forestry. So, the vacuum needed to be filled and I happily filled it. But I don't think there is much we could have done that could have gotten that in our time, the developing world just wasn't ready for it and saw our concerns as potentially encroaching on their sovereignty. I saw their anxieties first hand and they were genuine. India, Brazil, China, Malaysia - they weren't ready for it.
I certainly regret that the environmental issue didn't work to the President's political advantage, as I think it should have. But, on the other hand, the White House, itself, is largely implicated in that. I often had the feeling that probably all the heads of agencies must have, that if only I had had more latitude to operate independently and to control issues and their presentation myself, we would have done much better. I started by thinking I was the only non-politician in the mix of Bush appointees dealing with the environment. I ended up thinking I was the only one with really much of a feel for the politics of the environment as I watched them bungle one environmental issue after another from a political point of view. There was just this dependable and consistent capacity to make a silk purse into a sow's ear when we engaged issues like wetlands or the clean air regulations with the Competitiveness Council. The Rio choices were a string of bad political decisions motivated by discomfort with the issue and ideological antipathy to environmentalism that ran very deep, I think, on the part of some of the principals. And it led to failures that disappointed me. But ultimately those decisions will not have any enduring significance because the underpinnings of the apparatus and the record that we set were very firm, were very strong. Bush's environmental record is, in fact, very good, as people will acknowledge, particularly when they compare it with the Clinton environmental record from the point of view of budget or enforcement or new initiatives. It will take time to see that. Only the Administration's own internal conflicts obscured that while we were in office.
It would have been possible to overcome the antipathy of some of the activist environmental organizations that communicate directly to the country by drawing on the credibility that we had, that I had particularly, with the press, the people that covered EPA, for example, or the White House press, had we not been undermined so consistently by the Competitiveness Council and by the body language that was used to communicate about these issues. So in a sense, my perception of missed opportunities is more one of politics than it is of administration or of environmental performance, where I think we actually did very respectably.