![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Congress and EPA
Q: In your first term, what was your relationship, and the agency's relationship, to Congress?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: I would say by and large it was pretty good. Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat, was the chairman of the Senate Public Works Committee. He had been the author of the Clean Air Act and spent a lot of time on environmental issues in relative obscurity, until the public became agitated about them. Then it was quite helpful to him in a political sense. During my confirmation hearings, there was a good deal of speculation about Muskie's presidential ambitions. On the eve of the 1970 Congressional elections, Muskie and the President Nixon had a face off in which Muskie was widely perceived to have come out the better. By then he was clearly the leading Democratic candidate for president. He or his staff may have looked for openings to question Nixon's environmental record, but my relationship with him was really quite good. I think Muskie realized we were trying to do the right thing, trying to figure out how to make the EPA work.
Senator Howard Baker was the ranking member of the Public Works Committee. He was a friend of Muskie's, although politically they were on opposite sides of the fence. There wasn't much partisanship on that committee, and there still isn't. We found one or two Republicans antagonistic to our program, but the majority supported us in a broad, pro-environmental sense, without much confrontation.
The House had a little different equation. People like Congressman John Dingell, who in the early days of the environmental movement was something of an activist, later came to be perceived as less supportive. The House had a number of committees concerned with the environment. In fact, there were 15 I reported to in one form or another. When all of the institutional parts were combined to form EPA, we inherited all of these Congressional overseers. I tried to get Speaker of the House John McCormack and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to consolidate the environmental committees in both houses. They agreed it should be done and suggested I talk to the committee chairmen and see if they would make the consolidations. I did talk to them, and each one agreed to it--so long as the final arrangements were under their own control! Consequently, there are now some 50 different committees the EPA Administrator answers to. In general, Dingell's committee was the major one in the House, but Muskie's in the Senate was by far the single most powerful environmental committee in Congress.
Jamie Whitten was a crucial committee member in the House. He had responsibility over our appropriations and had written a book on pesticides prior to the formation of EPA. It was very negative towards pesticides regulation. Whitten represented--and still represents--a rural Mississippi delta district which felt that environmentalists had often, and unreasonably, opposed the use of chemicals for the control of pests on cotton and some other crops. Ile activists had also objected to public works projects, such as the building of deltas for flood control. Whitten thought these objections were crazy. So, the first time I met him he gave me an autographed copy of his book which, again, was very antagonistic to any regulation of pesticides. He believed it was all a lot of nonsense.
But I spent a lot of time with him. Before I'd make a decision that had any effect on something he thought was important, I'd go talk to him about it. Often, the decision was contrary to what he thought should be done. However, if you stayed in touch with him, communicated with him, and tried to accommodate his interests, it would normally be all right. He and some others might attack you publicly, but if they thought you were doing what you thought right, my experience showed they would not become totally alienated.
Q: When and why did Congress begin to diminish EPA's regulatory autonomy?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: That came as a result of the increasing mistrust of the executive branch by the legislative branch. It was caused partly because each of the two branches were controlled by a different political party. It also resulted from the Vietnam War. Even though the Democrats ruled both branches in the early years of the conflict, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, openly accused President Lyndon Johnson of lying to Congress about the conduct of the war. That attitude began to infect other committees. It became a hallmark of the relationship between the regulatory agencies and Muskie's Public Works Committee in the Senate; and to a lesser extent the House, where there were no presidential candidates.
In my view, the environmental statutory base became a casualty of this bad feeling. As a result, the early success with the Clean Air Act was copied indiscriminately. In this law, Congress had set automotive emissions standards that were not achievable on the basis of known technology. Assume you had to get 90 percent of carbon monoxide (one of the three major pollutants, along with hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides) out of car exhaust five years from 1970, when the Act passed. This meant the 90 percent reduction represented a technology-forcing mechanism; 90 percent reduction by 1975. Yet, for all intents and purposes, it worked. We did get enormous progress well beyond what anybody expected as a result of setting the standard. But in the highly partisan climate in Congress, the decision was made to stretch the lesson of the Clean Air Act; to set standards and apply deadlines across the board, for all kinds of pollutants. I don't think it was properly understood whether that made sense as a matter of public policy. The real issue was, would it work? Was it even a good mechanism for Congress to achieve further air pollution reductions?
Moreover, did the techniques used to achieve some early successes against automobile exhaust really have universal application? In Detroit, we had a very centralized industry. The sources of pollution were sent out through a unified distribution system; not at all like stationary sources located all over the country, or like even more complicated non-point sources of air and water pollution represented by sewage treatment plants, by farm fertilizers, and so on. Again, the automobile industry represented a very concentrated source of pollution. The auto makers, which are technology-driven enterprises that control much of the R & D apparatus themselves, and increasingly encounter strong foreign competition. Foreign competition may have been as important as anything. The Japanese testified at EPA hearings that they could achieve the standards and meet the deadlines. This had a powerful effect on American manufacturers to achieve the standards within the same period of time.
Given all these dynamics, the setting of standards and deadlines probably made some sense, at least in being able to make progress against automobile pollutants. But when you start applying this practice across the board, it often didn't make any sense. The early success with cars convinced Congress that this formula could be adopted universally. I think it greatly over-simplified the nature of the problem and, therefore, our approach to it. I also think it had a detrimental effect on public understanding of, and adaptation to the issues, ultimately preventing voters from making demands on their elected representatives which would have allowed EPA to put a more sensible and progressive process in place.