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Important issues
Q: What were the half dozen most important issues you faced in your first term?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: The most important imperative, I think, was establishing the credibility of the agency and demonstrating the willingness of the central government, and the political process, to respond to the legitimate demands of the people. I thought these tasks were essential. Second, it was crucial to organize the agency properly and set out some achievable goals. Third, I selected some issues to take on personally, in order to demonstrate the willingness of EPA to step up to its responsibilities. There were also some pressing issues like DDT, which required immediate attention; and enforcement action against three cities.
Likewise, there were some large industrial polluters that the public felt we should challenge, and we did. The job was made easier by the companies themselves. Some American industrialists believed environmentalism was a fad, a lot of nonsense that would go away if they just hunkered down, fought, and publicly confronted us. They couldn't have been more wrong. They really misjudged the power of the environmental movement and its ability to galvanize public support. So when they decided to confront me or the agency, it was simple to take them on. We couldn't have invented any better antagonist for the purpose of showing that this was serious business, that the agency was serious about its mission.
As things unfolded, the most complicated problem was, and remains, how to successfully manage the relationship between the agency and the White House; in particular, the OMB. By the nature of things, that office resisted large expenditures when it perceived minimal benefits were at stake. It was not impressed with the Congressional mandate to get on with environmental protection regardless of cost, as some of the statutes demanded. This situation acted as a serious impediment to the effectiveness of the EPA Administrator, who was immediately responsible to Congress to carry out its wishes. The OMB staff was removed from that responsibility and somewhat insulated as a result of cover in the White House. The relationship between EPA and OMB was a very difficult one, and remains so.
It's the hardest job for Bill Reilly, although the Competitive Council headed by Vice President Quayle has displaced OMB as the chief EPA nemesis within the administration. But White House reorganizations don't really matter. When Douglas Costle was administrator, the culprit was the Wage and Price Council. There is always going to be somebody in the White House handling the regulatory agencies who will resist--and resist with some justification--the EPA's initiatives. Yet, many such programs are pushed very hard by the Congress, which has an incomplete understanding of the countervailing White House pressures.
This predicament puts the administrator right in the middle of conflicting currents, and it is a very complicated thing to deal with. It began to occur almost as soon as I got to the agency. The first sign of the problem manifested itself during the issuance of the Clean Air Standards, as provided by the Clean Air Act. Under this statute, we had 90 days to issue ambient air quality standards for the whole nation. When I started at EPA, I was told that everybody had already agreed to these standards. They had been cleared through Congress, and HEW, which then ran the Air Pollution Control Agency, had developed a set of criteria documents which stood six feet high! I was handed them three or four days before the deadline and told they were all signed, everybody agreed to them, there was no controversy; just announce them and the agency would start to enforce the new Clean Air Act.
We made some modifications, but not many, and announced the standards. The impact on industry was quite dramatic. Its leaders got very agitated and charged the White House. Nixon's staff then formed a Quality of Life Review Committee, which was the precursor of all of the White House oversight and led to so much rancor between OMB and EPA. No matter which political party is in office, this tension will persist. I couldn't resolve it then, and when I went back to the agency in 1983, I got right back in the middle of it! The same people were there! The same people in the agency, the same people in OMB, fighting each other over what should happen to these standards!