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Concluding remarks
Q: In timing that question, I didn't mean to end on a negative note, but that's my final question. Do you have any concluding remarks? Is there something that in the past, probably what's going to turn out to be seven and a half hours of tape beginning in July and ending finally here in November, that you haven't mentioned that you think is worth mentioning or that one of my questions hasn't addressed that you think is worth mentioning?
MR. REILLY: You know there are so many areas of policy that we could go into in more detail, but no, I can't think of any questions you haven't asked. You really have covered it. You know, I think some people look back at our period and consider that we started so well and ended badly. I find myself introduced, sometimes, as the voice that cried in the wilderness, as someone who tried to be the conscience of the Bush Administration on the environment. I went into that job with no illusions. I knew all of my predecessors; I knew how much conflict there had been and how many disappointments some of them had had in their times. In fact, I had many more than my share of good days. I remember Bill Ruckelshaus said as he announced his retirement, his resignation from EPA, that an EPA Administrator gets two days in the sun, the day he's announced and the day he leaves, and everything in between is rain.
That was not true for me. I had a lot of sunny days and I owe them to George Bush and to the relationship that I had with the President. My relationship with him was more congenial, much more personally satisfying, I think, than any of my predecessors had had with the Presidents they served. It resulted in much more achievement. That it was less successful politically than it might have been is largely the consequence, I believe, of decisions made at the White House that I accepted at the time with a sense that they never involved any moral compromise but were prudential judgments on which reasonable people could differ. Pressures that I was subjected to I could resist, and did resist, when I thought they were improper and there were no recriminations for that. It was a clean Administration. It was an honest and ethical Administration.
Although it is the new initiatives and controversial decisions that government officials make that receive most attention, the life blood of the Agency, 99 percent of the things it does for the environment attract relatively little attention. The permits that are written, the approvals and denials of permission to fill a wetland or open a waste facility or set a standard or pesticide tolerance, and the quality of the staff work that goes into such decisions - these are the principal determinants of environmental quality, what really add up to the integrity of the operation. With that perspective in mind, it is thanks largely to the quality of the people who work at EPA, their zeal, their commitment, the fact that for them it's not just a job, they really believe in what they're doing and that they are doing something fundamentally important. That is what made our four years a very productive and exciting time. It's a time that EPA professionals, and the country beyond Washington, will look back on as a time of enormous creativity and energy and achievement in the environment. So, I was happy to have been along for that ride.
Q: Thank you for your time.