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Personal expectations of EPA
Q: When you first became EPA Administrator in December 1970, what were your personal expectations? What did you hope to achieve in the broad sense?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: In the first place, given the public concern about the environment that led to the creation of EPA, it seemed to me important to demonstrate to the public that the government was capable of being responsive to their expressed concerns; namely, that we would do something about the environment. Therefore, it was important for us to advocate strong environmental compliance, back it up, and do it; to actually show we were willing to take on the large institutions in the society which hadn't been paying much attention to the environment. That included both public and private sectors. The private sector polluters, like the big steel companies who hadn't paid much attention to the problem, needed to be pushed very hard for compliance. The cities also needed to be pushed to move forward. All of that was necessary in order to show the public that there was some progress being made.
We then needed to set goals for the agency which were achievable and which had some parameters that made sense. In 1970, I thought about other agencies which had recently been formed. Two came to mind: NASA, and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). NASA had a very narrow, precise goal set for it by President Kennedy--to get to the moon by the end of the decade. On the other hand, it seemed to me OEO had set an overly broad goal, in effect saying, "Let's do something about poverty." Both premises can destroy an institution. In one case, you define an objective and achieve it. But then what do you do? I don't think NASA has yet figured out its role since the lunar landings. At OEO, the goal was so amorphous--let's do something about poverty--that not nearly enough could be measured and demonstrated as progress. Without that, how can you build on successes and move on to the next plateau? Somehow, EPA needed to find the middle ground between those two. We needed to set goals for ourselves that were concrete enough to be realized, but not so narrow that you couldn't maintain momentum and make progress.
I was convinced then--and have become increasingly so since--that the environment is a problem you must tend to everlastingly. It doesn't go away. It's not like putting out a fire or even building a highway. You can't do it, then brush your hands and say, "On to the next task." You have to keep at it all the time, otherwise it starts to slide back. But how do you keep attention--both institutional attention and public attention--focused on that kind of a problem? New issues crop up all the time, therefore, measuring progress is difficult. Also, because of the constant pressure of struggling not to fall behind, the agency and its people may lose heart. It's an ongoing dilemma which EPA is still fighting.
So it seemed to me we needed to set goals. We needed to organize. We had 15 agencies or pieces of agencies all under our umbrella. We had separate and overlapping geographic regions for air, water, and solid waste, which we had to bring together in one regional structure. We had to organize the agency headquarters in Washington. We inherited a pesticides agency from the Agriculture Department which was created to stop what the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was doing to regulate pesticides. All of a sudden, both were under one roof!
I needed to gain enough understanding of the nature of the agency, and what should be done, before organizing it, so that the organizational structure itself didn't get in the way of progress. By the same token, we needed to provide some structure in a timely fashion so that people didn't get discouraged and start drifting away from our central purpose. So in about four or five months--inundated with organization charts floating around my office--I just chose an organizational structure. It's been reorganized several times since, so obviously it wasn't a perfect structure. But it was important to provide some clear organizational framework.