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History
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1995
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EPA History Program
Oral History Interview-4
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Administrator
William K. Rdlly
September 1995
United States EPA 202-K-95-002
Environmental Protection .
Agency
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Table of Contents
Forward iv
William K. Reilly biography , i vi
Early life >. 2
Interest in land use management .. „ '...." ••. 5
Council on Environmental Quality , 6
Other mentors 7
International interests 9
The Conservation Foundation .! 11
World Wildlife Fund 12
Initial perception of the Agency '• 13
President Bush ! 15
Top EPA personnel i 19
Conflicts with the White House : 22
Assessment of President Bush as the "Environmental '.
President" i 26
Executive Branch Coordination 27
Bill Ruckelshaus and Russell Train ,28
Relationship with EPA career staff 29
Management style 30
Hank Habicht -32
Agenda 33
Risk assessment 35
Ecosystem management ! 37
Thoughts on abolition of CEQ .. . ; 39
EPA's relationship with natural resource based agencies ..! 40
EPA and Congress ,42
Stagnation of EPA's legislative proposals '46
OMB and the Council on Competitiveness .47
EPA and the Press 50
EPA oversight ; 52
Global political changes and EPA ;53
EPA's relationship with industry ... 55
State and local governments ;58
Tribal governments !61
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National debate on the environment 62
EPA and environmental groups 63
Reorganization ^6
Frustrations • • '" " "'«Q
Environmental philosophy 69
Advice to Successors and Public 71
Significant accomplishments '.'. 73
Concluding remarks • 7^
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Photographs
EPA Administrator William K. Reiliy 1
President Bush and EPA Administrator Reiliy 44
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Forward
This publication is the fourth in a series of interviews of EPA
leaders that includes William Ruckelshaus, Russell Train, pd
Alvin Aim. The EPA history program undertook this project
to preserve, distill, and disseminate the main experiences and
insights of the men and women who have led the Agency.
EPA decision makers and staff, related government entities,
the environmental community, scholars and the general public
will all profit from these recollections. Separately, each of the
interviews will describe the perspectives of particular leaders.
Collectively, these reminiscences will illustrate the dynamic
nature of EPA's historic mission; the personalities and ,
institutions which have shaped its outlook; the context of the
times in which it operated; and some of the Agency's principal
achievements and shortcomings. i
The techniques used to prepare the EPA oral history series1
conform to the practices commonly observed by professional
historians. The questions, submitted in advance, are broad, and
open-ended, and the answers are preserved on audio tape. ,
Once transcripts of the recordings are completed, the History
Program staff edits the manuscripts to improve clarity, factual
accuracy, and logical progression. The finished manuscripts
are then returned to the interviewees, who may alter the text to
eliminate errors made during the transcription of the tapes,, or
during the editorial phase of preparation.
A collaborative work such as this incurs many debts. Kathy
Petruccelli, Director of EPA's Management and Organization
Division, provided the leadership to support the history
program. Her superiors, who have changed over the course of
the period in which this interview has been produced, John
Chamberlin, Director of the Office of Administration and
Jonathan Z. Cannon, Assistant Administrator for
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Jonathan Z. Cannon, Assistant Administrator for
Administration and Resources Management provided the
funds. Susan Denning performed invaluable proofreading and
logistical services. Finally, the crucial contributions of two
EPA Administrators must be recognized: Carol Browner, who
has seen fit to continue the EPA History Program in the face
of tight budgetary times; and William K. Reilly himself who
not only has provided a candid and highly insightful interview
but also was responsible for creating the EPA History
Program.
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William K. Reilly Biography i
William K. Reilty (b. Jan. 28, 1940) served as the seventh1
Senate confirmed EPA Administrator between February 8,
1989, and December 31, 1992. Born in Decatur, Illinois, into
a conservative, deeply religious household, Reilly was
strongly influenced by his father, a highway construction steel
merchant, who impressed upon him an interest in land, history
(especially that of Abraham Lincoln's Illinois days), and i
justice through the example he set while young Reilly '•
accompanied him to state and county auctions to peddle his
steel culverts and bridge materials. Reilly's father then led his
family from Illinois to South Texas when William Reilly was
10. There Reilly learned to appreciate the unique cultural and
environmental problems associated with transnational .
environmental affairs. From the Rio Grande Valley, the
Reillys moved to Fall River, Massachusetts, where he finished
high school at Durfee High School. From Durfee he went on
to Yale where he earned a B.A. in History. During his Yale
years, Reilly took advantage of Yale's junior year abroad
program to study in France. Reilly then earned a law degree
from Harvard, completing a thesis on land reform in Chile.
After law school, Reilly entered the Army and served a tour,of
duty (1966-1967) in Europe with an intelligence unit planning
for the evacuation of U.S. troops from France. During that
time, he married Elizabeth Buxton.
After completing his military service, Reilly returned
to school at Columbia, where he earned a Masters degree in
urban planning. In 1968, fresh from planning school and a
four month project in Turkey, Reilly went to work for Urban
America, Inc., where he worked to integrate century old
concerns for urban beautification with the concerns brought to
the forefront of the American conscience by the civil rights
movement—concerns which would grow into the
environmental justice movement with which he dealt during
his EPA Administration. !
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In 1970, Reilly became a senior staff member of the
President's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) under
Russell Train, who would later become the second EPA
Administrator' in 1972. Reilly moved from CEQ to become
president of The Conservation Foundation, which merged
with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1985. After the merger,
he served as President of World Wildlife Fund until taking
over the helm at EPA in 1989.
As the following interview will show, the Reilly
Administration accomplished several important tasks between
1989 and 1992. EPA oversaw the crafting of new Clean Air
Act Amendments in 1990. It pushed for leadership in
international environmental affairs in the face of global
political changes by establishing liaisons in eastern Europe,
participating in trade negotiations to ensure that the
environment was considered during the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the-Gerieral Agreement on
Trade and Tariffs, and encouraged the Agency to play a larger
role in working with Mexico to address problems along the
Mexican border both in environmentally and socially
responsible ways. Reilly also encouraged EPA to continue to
work with the regulated community to find voluntary Ways to
go beyond mandated emissions standards. Reilly also
encouraged EPA to address regional pollution problems which
forced the Agency to strive to design cross-media regulatory
strategies, these strategies had been discussed but deemed
too unmanageable and complex to devote vast amounts of
energy in the face of more pressing needs by previous
Administrations.
Perhaps the most significant failure of the Reilly
Administration, as Reilly suggests below, was that EPA was
unable to garner the unalloyed support of the Bush
Administration during the second half of that Administration s
term. This was largely due to the inability of the Agency to
muster the politically valuable praise of the Administration's
environmental efforts by environmental organizations. As a
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result, the Bush Administration chose to w6rk more closely
with elements of its constituency that would provide political
support during the 1992 election season. As a result, EPA
found its agenda stifled in the White House, and its credibility,
compromised before Congress. i
After leaving the Agency during the final days of ;
1992, Reilly returned to World Wildlife Fund. From his
office in that institution's headquarters, Reilly summed up his
time at EPA by saying:
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.... 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
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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.
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EPA Administrator William K. Reilly
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1
SESSION I: July 26, 1993, World Wildlife Fund Headquarters, Washington, D.C
MR. WILLIAMS: Mr. Reilly, would you please describe for me your
upbringing, your early life and your education?
MR REILLY- I was born in Decatur, Illinois, into a very close-knit,
very religious, and very conservative family. My father was in business for
himself. He sold steel—bridge materials, reinforcing bars, and metal culvert
through his own Highway Supply Company. And my mother worked very closelj
with him. She was his bookkeeper, accountant, and partner. I had one older
sister four and a half years older than I, who is now a teacher outside of Chicago.
' 1 lived for 10 years in Decatur, Illinois—downstate, Illinois—a city then
of about 80 000 population; it's not too much more now. I grew up surrounded b;
Lincoln memorabilia and memories. My father sort of rode the circuit, just as
Lincoln did, but for a different purpose. He traveled to county
lettings-auctions-and state lettings and township lettings to sell his materials
Whenever we would pass a Lincoln marker we would stop. The Lincoln-Douglai
debates took place in that area. Every single courthouse had its Lincoln _
memorabilia because he, typically, argued cases in those courthouses, or their
predecessors. It's farm country and we had a farm. I spent some time on that. I
went to parochial schools there, Catholic schools.
When I was ten, we moved to Texas, southern Texas, largely because a
big steel strike in 1949 pretty much put my father's business on hold for four or
five months-he didn't have anything to sell. We relocated to the Rio Grande
Valley My father was, for a little while, working for Dow Chemical. Then he
Went to work on his own as a contractor and did some construction. I remember
that was the time when I became familiar with some of the problems that we now
call colonias-these unsewered communities without any services at all, typicall)
of undocumented aliens, or first-generation Mexican-Americans, along the
My father employed some undocumented workers. In fact, he got in
trouble with the local construction contractor establishment because he paid their
too much I remember that we used to drive out in the country to pick them up ir
the morning and then drive them back out in the evening. I saw the abject povetl
that they lived in. I got to know some, one became a good friend. Neither of us
had many friends then in Texas. He was in his twenties, I was then probably 11.
His name was Dom Juan Garza. Whenever he was picked up by the Bureau of
Immigration and taken to Mexico, he would reappear within a few days, having
walked all night, if necessary, and ready to do anything—pick grapefruit or work
at the motel where I first met him and where he was a worker. I developed some
limited knowledge, but a lot of affection and respect and sympathy for Mexicans
I think that affected my later priority on some of those issues at EPA. One of the
proudest things I did was to help get $50 million for colonias in the last Bush
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budget—and a lot of money for the border. 1 worked hard on the Nortl) American
Free Trade Agreement, too.
I lived in the Rio Grande Valley for two years. It didn't really work too
well for my father economically there. We finally then moved to northern
Illinois. By that time he was quite ill; he had serious ulcers. After another two
years, when I lived in St. Charles, Illinois, he had one of the first operations to
remove most of his stomach. To recuperate from that, he went back to live with
his sister in Fall River, Massachusetts. By that time my sister was off in college
and my mother and I went with my father. When he was finally recovered and
-eady to go back to Illinois, I just stayed behind because I had started high school
and was doing well there. He left me there in the care of my aunt. So, I went to a
large public high school in Massachusetts for four years, Durfee High. Td go out
ind work, drive for him, in Illinois in the summertime. When I finished high
school, I went to Yale. I spent my junior year in France and then after that went
:o Harvard Law School, followed by half a year or so in law practice, two years in
he Army, and then another year and a half in school, at Columbia, studying urban
banning.
So, I've had somewhat of a wandering up-bringing in various parts of the
;ountry, which I must say I never minded. I always thought that the moves we
nade were pretty interesting, the parts of the country I lived in, the Middle West
tnd its prairie and farm country and the German-Irish settlement influence, and
Pexas, which was very heavily Hispanic—even then, the city I lived in,:
larlingen, was about 50 percent Hispanic. Then, up to the northeast, to Fall
liver, which had the only French daily newspaper in the United States at that
ime, had twenty-some French-speaking Catholic; churches and another
wenty-some Portuguese-speaking churches and a lot of Italian-speaking
hurches! A very large ethnic population—Syrians, Lebanese, Jews; a really
ascinating melting pot to be exposed to—very different from the Midwest where
had begun life. So, I thought each of those moves was enriching in one respect
r another. The Fall River era was the time I came to love the sea and came to
now Cape Cod and Newport, Rhode Island, Providence, Mount Hope Bay, and
ome of those areas. My family vacationed there, and most of my aunts:and
ncles and cousins lived around there.
Anyway, after Harvard I went to practice law for a little while in
Chicago, but had a commitment to go in the Army so I took the bar exam in both
lassachusetts and Illinois, and then went into the Army. I went to the Infantry
(fficers School in Ft. Benning, Georgia; Intelligence Officers School in.
•altimore, Maryland, Ft. Holabird; and had orders to Vietnam much of that time.
hen, at the last minute, my orders were changed and I was sent to Germany with
little group of sixteen or seventeen—the first intelligence officers' class in two
r three years to have been sent to Europe, because by that time we were
spieling our intelligence officer numbers in NATO with everyone going to Viet-
am. My responsibility was to help plan the quick departure of our forces, or at
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least the Army Intelligence component of them, from France after de Gaulle gave
he US forc/s 90 days to get out. My knowledge of French and being^awyer
had a very practical advantage: it resulted in my being assigned very nteresting
work in Europe. I did that and then went to German Language School as part of
my Army experience in Europe.
When I had fewer than 13 months to serve, less than the standard
Vietnam tour of duty, and thus could no longer be sent there, I came home to get
marked to Elizabeth Buxton, a woman I had met at Harvard We were marned at
St Thomas More Chapel at Yale, where her father was a professor and chairman
of the Psychology Department. After another year in Germany I came back to a
different'count^reairy, in early 1968. The place was very different: fltjm w a t
had been when I left. The anti-war movement was going strong, there was a lot o
anti-authority feeling in the schools-in fact, I was scarcely at Columbia a few
months when Mark Rudd and the Students for a Democratic Society shut it down
beginning with the school I was in, the Architecture School where I was an Urban
Planning student. For a few days I was annoyed about that, but then I realized
this was a marvelous education. So, I used to go up to the Columbia campus
every day and just listen to the speeches, whether they were by Mark Rudd and
his colleagues in SDS, or Black Panthers, or whoever was holdmg forth that day.
I went to Columbia because of Charles Abrams, a really great man who had
written Man's Struggle for Shelter in An Urbanizing WcrKL He was an architect
of the 1968 Housing Bill with Senator Percy and with the HUD Secretary. I did
three semesters there, after which they awarded me a Masters degree.
I spent a summer working on a regional planning project in Turkey, on
which my wife accompanied me. She had worked for the City Planning
Department of New Haven and had more experience than I had I thought at that
time I wanted to be some kind of international urban planner and consultant. But
in Turkey we experienced very strong anti-American feeling. Our new
ambassador was fresh from the Vietnam pacification program Ambassador
Kome?, and his car was turned over and burned on his first visit to the university
with which we were affiliated, Middle East Technical University. That summer s
experience indicated to me that it wasn't a good time for Americans to be going
around the world telling other people how to behave. So I came back and ended
up going to work for something called Urban America, Incorporated, which I
thought I would just do for a year or so before going back to my law practice in
Chicago. As it turned out, I never went back. Urban America, Inc. merged with
the National Urban Coalition. Then, the President's Council on Environment^
Quality, which was setting up and looking for a land use lawyer, went to my old
law firm for advice about whom to pick. They suggested me.
So, I found myself one of the Council's first staff members under Russel
Train and was given the job of helping draft the regulations—they were then
guidelines—implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and the
Environmental Impact Statement procedures. I also drafted a National Land Use
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A.ct. That was the only one of the big legislative proposals on which we
worked in the early 1970s that did not make it into law. The Coastal Zone
Management Act is essentially the same bill that I had drafted, based on the
American Law Institute's Model Land Development Code. So, we got a piece of
it, a grant incentive program for the coast but not for the whole country.
After two years there, I was invited to direct a task force on land use for
the President's Commission on Environmental Quality, chaired by Laurence S.
Rockefeller. We produced a report in 1973, The Use of Land: A Citizen's Policy
Guide to Urban Growth, which went through three printings and sold 50,000
;opies. I accepted an invitation then to become President of The Conservation
Foundation. In 1985, it affiliated with World Wildlife Fund and later merged
;ompletely. In 1985,1 became President of both institutions. That's where I was
kvhen President Bush asked me to become EPA Administrator. That's probably
nore than you wanted to know.
MR. WILLIAMS: No, that was very thorough. It covered several
questions. I do want to go back just a .second, though. You earned your Juris
ioctorate and then returned from Europe and earned a masters in urban
banning. Reading your resume, it seemed to me that there was a big jump there.
•Yas there something that had happened before going into the military br during
he time you were in the military that encouraged an interest in land use
nanagement? Can you explain that?
MR. REILLY: Well, I was always interested in land and I have often
ried to figure out why that was—whether it was because we had a farm early on
tnd I spent a lot of time there, or because my father was interested in land. We
ised to look at land, he used to think about buying it—he liked to think;about
)uying a lot more property than he ever bought. I can remember looking at
jeautiful oceanfront property with him near Point Judith in Rhode Island.
I honestly don't know where the motivation came from, but I did my law
ichool thesis on land reform in Chile, with Charles Harr. I worked one summer
m a book with a team of people headed by Lawrence Wylie, who was then C.
Douglas Dillon Professor of French Civilization at Harvard. The book we wrote
vas called Chanzeaux: Village d'Anjou, published by Harvard University Press in
inglish and by Gallimard in French. Basically, my part of it was to write about
and tenure, agricultural law, the passage of property to children, credit systems,
tow the French were trying to reassemble parcels that had been divided through
generations of Napoleonic law.
In fact, I chose to go to work for Ross Hardies in Chicago, because they
vere the premier law firm dealing with land use issues, certainly in Chicago and
>robably in the country. I found myself working on gas rate regulation, which
vas also a large part of their practice. Later, I decided to go to planning school
tartly to get reintroduced to the country, having been away at a time of great
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social change and turmoil, but partly also to help ensure that if I did, or when I
did, go back to the law firm, I would be used in the area of my interest because I
would have a degree in urban planning.
Urban America, Incorporated, for which I worked following my studies
at Columbia, was concerned with what seemed to me the two great themes in
American city development: one was race and civil rights and the other was
planning, the city beautiful movement—the Frederick Law Omsted tradition and
the parks and the rest. Very few of our institutions have been successful at
bridging the divide between those two concerns, social policy and development
policy generally, for the broader population. They tried to do that. I became an
expert in how you prevent communities from using large lot zoning or minimum
lot sizes to exclude minorities and poor people. At that time I didn't think that I
knew very much about conservation law or how to protect land.
I can recall saying to Timothy Atkeson, who was my immediate boss at
the Council when I started there—he was General Counsel and he later became
my Assistant Administrator at EPA for International Activities in 1989—1 said to
him, "I don't really know much about how you protect land from development.
I'm really an expert at breaking down restrictive procedures and laws." He smilec
and said, "Well, it's really just the oher side of the same coin, isn't it?" And, of
course, it is.
I found myself then working on protection schemes—but not completel)
With the help of Fred Bosselman, a Ross Hardies lawyer, I drafted a federal
legislative proposal "to provide funds to communities to protect what we called
areas of critical environmental concern and also to ensure that "development of
regional benefit" be accommodated, even against the wishes of localities that
resisted it. It was a balanced approach, which I think we have to have in our land
use and development law. So, I kind of sidled into the conservation side of law
and can't say that this was a charted course or a direct route, but it happened to be
mine.
MR. WILLIAMS: You told me a little bit about how you became
involved in the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ); was (his the first
encounter you had with Russell Train?
MR. REILLY: Yes. I remember going to visit him at the Interior
Department when he was Undersecretary there, just prior to his taking up his new
position as CEQ Chairman, and having an interview with him after I had been
interviewed by Timothy Atkeson. Atkeson told me that I should tackle him as he
came through the hallway there. He came through a little out of breath—coming
from the Congress, I think—and I immediately jumped up and started to speak to
"In a minute, in a minute," he said, "let me catch my breath, I'll call for
you in a few minutes."
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I can remember, in fact, the first conversation I overheard with him.
Someone said to him, "We're going to have a phone installed in your cjar this
week," and he said, "Good Lord, why do you want to do that, it's the only peace
and quiet I ever get." When I served at EPA, I discovered why he might not have
wanted a phone in his car. Truly the only peace and quiet you get in public life is
traveling in an airplane, although now they're getting phones in planes, too.
He called for me and then interviewed me. We had a very nice interview
and always got on well. I became not only a land use staff member at the
Council, but I ended up writing a number of speeches on other issues for him as
well. He became a mentor to me. I suppose if I have two in public life;, they are
Russell Train and Bill Ruckelshaus. ;
In fact, Train has had most of the jobs that I have had for the last 20
/ears. He preceded me as President of The Conservation Foundation, as.President
af World Wildlife Fund, as EPA Administrator. I've not gone on the tax court and
[ don't intend to—not that they would have me. But, I have enormous respect for
lim and have learned a great deal from him.
MR. WILLIAMS: Would you say that you had any other mentors?
MR. REILLY: I certainly had another mentor in a man named John
Bross, John Adams Bross, who was a CIA official and member of The
Conservation Foundation Board from 1974 on. He was thoughtful, very modest,
md very cultivated in an unassuming way. He had a wry, twinkly, humorous
ittitude towards a lot of things and particularly was able to be funny abput the
hings that a lot of people would be pompous about—things that he knew and had
experienced. He knew Shakespeare and he knew art and he knew government
md politicians and he knew people, he'd known the important ones who'd come
hrough Washington over the last 25 years or so. I can recall many a fine lunch
vith him where I just soaked up the kind of wisdom he tossed off nonchalantly. I
emember, in fact, I went directly from my announcement as EPA Administrator
it the White House with President Bush to his hospital room and talked to him
ibout everything. He'd seen it on television. He had a bad case, then, of cancer.
t had him in the hospital, but he recovered for another couple of years and died,
ust about two years ago, now.
My father, of course, has been a very important figure in my life, too.
tery strong, very generous, capable of being severe but also quite compassionate
o people who need help. Very religious; I often think how much easier I've had
t than he had it. He was a child of the Depression. As a teenager he worked on
tie Fall River Line on a boat that went back and forth from Fall River to New
rork. He was also a dining car steward on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then he
/ent out on his own to Illinois, very bravely, without any health insurance or
enefits or retirement or any security or clear prospects at all. It took him two or
iree years before he made any money at all. He pretty much was supported by
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his brother who was also in the business and would give him an advance for the
He finally had a big success at the Illinois State Fair where he sold a big
pile of steel culvert several times over, metal culverts, to township commissioners
responsible for country roads and drainage who were coming through. He was
able to make that the start of his success in business. But he worked very, very •
hard for what he got and paid the price in his health. He later recovered that and
has been a very successful man by any measure. But I think he has the sort of
divine discontent that characterizes a lot pf artists and perfectionists. He sees a lot
of ways that things could have been better. He gave me a great education and
obviously valued that tremendously. He also made great sacrifices, not just
financial, but in allowing me to stay in Massachusetts where he thought I was
going to get a better high school education than if I had moved around with him,
which is certainly true.
What he, and I, did was always with the great support of my mother, who
is a very warm, loving, tolerant person and who has no rough edges. She just
communicated a great love and security to me that probably has a good deal to do
with my sense that life would go on and it would unfold in ways that I would
probably like—which it has. Successful, confident men tend not to talk much
about their mothers. I've noticed, though, more than anyone it's mothers who
make for secure sons, I think. Unlike my father, my mother radiated a quiet,
reassuring faith in the future, and a sunny optimism. Like my mother, I don't
worry a lot.
MR. WILLIAMS: What would you say you've learned from Mr.
Ruckelshaus?
\ \ i •', ',.
MR. REILLY: Ruckelshaus had a very clear concept of the need not
only to ensure integrity in public service, in government; as a government official,
but also to communicate to the country what a government agency was doing and
why. I saw my job, in very large part in 1989, as one of communication. At that
time, and certainly now, we had more diffuse anxieties in the country than we
could ever craft policies and programs to address.
The public is very concerned about risk—particularly the involuntary
kind the kind that they believe they're subjected to by chemicals in their food or
pollutants in the air or water. They need to have all of that put in perspective and
they need to embrace some sense of proportion. People need to have some
guidance from a trusted source about what matters and what doesn't, or rather
about what matters most and what matters less. That is necessary for EPA to do
its job with respect and credibility.
We heard in 1989, as we continue to hear, that EPA isn't doing this or
that or it's missing this or that milestone. Of course, it's always true. It's a
consequence of so many responsibilities that have been given the Agency without
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sufficient authority or resources to carry them out. But ultimately, government is
accountable to people and it's people who are causing their Congressional
representatives to write these bills and to continue to write them, even though the
money isn't there any longer. In fact, the EPA budget's gone down this year very
substantially from what the last Bush budget was. The only way to do that is to
cause people to believe fundamentally that there is integrity in the process—those
in government do know what they're doing. :
Second of all, some things pose much less risk to people than others and.
officials need to acknowledge that in their public representations to the Congress
and finally in the budgets and priorities that the Agency proposes. Thfe only way
that you arrive at that point is through constant communication. I think that
Ruckelshaus had a clear sense of that. Certainly at the very beginning of EPA he
spent considerable time on it and, when he came back in '83, he spent even more
time on that. I believe in that. He was not excessively focused on the Congress or
on the internal workings of the bureaucracy, which happens to so many agency
leaders. He recognized the broad country out there from which our mandate
comes but also whose sense of priorities have shaped the program thatneeds
reform.
MR. WILLIAMS: You mentioned a bit earlier about going to Europe
and then Turkey and experiencing those places. Would you say that was the
origin of your keen interest in international work or would you say that came from
something else?
MR. REILLY: The truth is that I think I developed my international
interests as a high school student in Fall River, Massachusetts, who was just
fascinated by some of the French convent girls who were sheltered from us
non-French folks. I remember trying to crash the Franco-American dances and
liaving people grill me at the door about "What's your name? What's ybur
mother's name?" and then saying, "Well sorry, you can't come in here." There
were five convent schools, I think then, and I eventually succeeded in dating one
}f those girls. I was very interested in French arid in France. When I applied to
;ollege, I only applied to two schools, Georgetown and Yale. I made it very clear
n my application that their junior year abroad programs were part of what I was
jpplying for. I was true to that; I went on to study in France. '.
I've spent a lot of time abroad in the course of my life. I worked a
lumber of summers and then studied one full academic year in France. I spent
>ne summer in Switzerland working for the United Nations while I was in law
ichool. I spent one summer hitch-hiking all over Europe—I used to hitch-hike
vhenever I went there. In fact, I hitch-hiked one summer starting out in Paris
icross England to Wales, to Ireland and all around Ireland, back across England
ind then across Belgium and to Germany up to Stockholm and back from
Stockholm almost down to Vienna. I learned a lot doing that—that's a good way
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to get to know a place. I lived for a year and a quarter m Germany and went to
language school there when I was in the Army. I lived for four months in Turkey,
in 1968 when I went there on a regional planning project, I ve had about 13
summer vacations in Italy. A friend has a place there that our family often goes
to I spent two weeks in Spain and two weeks in Mexico this past spring just
working on language. I like Europe a lot and I've always thought it was very
important. I was a history major in college, and believe, with DeGaulle, that
"America is the daughter of Europe." Europe is obviously the cradle of our
civilization, our values, and our institutions. And I have become very interested
in Latin America. When I was President of World Wildlife Fund that was my
principal area of interest. Mexico and Brazil were WWFs two biggest programs
and Central America was a large one. I then set out to learn Spanish and came to
understand that part of the world much better.
I'm sure that the international interest was the reason why I gave such
priority to some things'at EPA-like the Border Plan, and the North American
Free Trade Agreement, for which I testified six or seven times. I discovered,
incidentally that, as far as I could ascertain, no environmental minister from any
country had ever gotten involved in a trade treaty, nor had an EPA Administrator
testified on a trade treaty. I thought that the NAFTA was very important to the
environment but also very important to our Mexican-American relationship and
the stability of Mexico. I continue to give a high priority to that and one of the
public lectures I deliver in the fall at Stanford will be on international institutions
another one will be on trade and the environment, both of them very international
in orientation. .
We are part of a larger world and the environment of that world is one
that cannot be managed successfully by one country. It cannot be managed
because the pollutants travel and don't respect borders. -It also cannot be managed
because we are going to be in a web of trade relationships for which the
environment can be misused for protectionist purposes, to exclude goods by
claiming their production harms the environment, or to create a competitive
advantage at the expense of the environment—by having lax controls that make
your products'cheaper, i.e., by creating a pollution haven. As we gradually
relieve the tariff burdens on trade, countries will pursue their economic interests
through other means. Very often those other means will be by saying, "Well,
we're not clamping down on beef hormones to keep your beef out, but rather
because it's environmentally unacceptable, and so forth." That will require people
who are concerned about the environment to become much more knowledgeable
about trade and to come to respect the need for free trade because it advances the
environment, aside from advancing other aspects of welfare. But we need to
advance trade interests with a sense of protection for those things that we value
and don't want to see unraveled—which trade people, often insensitive to
environmental controls, can unwittingly unravel. I don't know how I got there.
Your question didn't necessarily lead all over there, did it?
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MR. WILLIAMS: It didn't necessarily, but that was a good path. What
did you learn from your earlier experiences -with The Conservation Foundation
and World Wildlife Fund? •
MR. RE1LLY: The Conservation Foundation's niche was to .recognize
those issues on which the country was stalemated or which were not being very
successfully addressed but in which we saw an opportunity. In the mid-seventies
when the oil shocks hit and the economic crisis occurred, there was a sense that
we had bitten off quite a lot in the environment. We had passed laws on air and
water and strip mining and toxic substances and coastal zone management and
endangered species—many of them quite ambitious and virtually all of them more
expensive and, in some cases more obstructive of other interests, than; had been
understood.
The economic community, which was capable of helping us refine and
make efficient many of those laws, had pretty much opted out of their early
formulation. They had fought them so bitterly that they weren't really at the table
in helping craft regulations. Yet, it seemed to me, that the environmental
community could not take those laws much further alone, and certainly couldn't
ensure their successful, efficient implementation without the involvement of
business. These laws were coming under heavy fire for their cost and-
bureaucracy, particularly at a time of national economic difficulty. The business
community was being driven crazy by some of the early costs of regulation, the
demands being placed on them, and also by the public image they were getting as
obstructionists. And yet, any reasonable reading of the polls, it seemed to me,
indicated that the nation was wedded to environmental values, wanted to see those
laws kept, and, in some cases, wanted to see them strengthened. The environment
was entering the core values, as the pollster, Bob Teeter, has put it, of our people.
If you think of those two sets of interests—of environmentalists wanting to see the
laws they had championed work, and industrialists realizing that ;
environmentalism was here to stay and therefore the realistic goal was to achieve
more cost-effective implementation—you realize there is a.common basis for
getting some agreements between business and environmental groups.
Based upon that, in 1974 we developed a program in business and the
environment which tried to get consensus on critical, divisive issues such as on
road building in national forests, which environmentalists prefer to keep as little
intrusive as possible and which the timber industry also doesn't want to have to
build wider or more expensively than necessary. Toxic substances control and the
early implementation of a new toxics law was another issue we took on then. We
sponsored a project on natural gas with the Committee on Economic
Development. Project participants advocated deregulating natural gas prices in
order to bring on a fuel that would really help the environment and was in
plentiful supply in the United States.
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We had a program on groundwater chaired by Governor Babbitt that
included business leaders, environmentalists, state and Federal officials. It
designed measures that would protect groundwater and give some clarity and
certainty to the development process. Babbitt had done that very well in Arizona.
We followed that project up with a major task force on wetlands, chaired by
Governor Kean of New Jersey, and that was designed to try to bring people
together on that very divisive subject. Out of that group came the
recommendation for no net loss of wetlands, the recommendation that President
Bush committed to in the 1988 campaign and later became a priority of EPA and
the Administration. The groundwater report fed into policies that we
implemented at EPA also. Those reports had far-reaching impact.
The Conservation Foundation's operating style was relatively quiet, very
inclusive with a sense that we wanted to look for ways to bring people together
around policies that would endure. It always struck me as a conservationist that
those policies will not endure that do not have the adherence of the economic
sector We simply must embrace economics in our environmental formulation,
just as I think the economic sector has to factor in the environment and health now
to a degree that it did not used to do, if we're to have a sustainable economy and
also public support and acceptance of a lot of what the industrial sector does and
wants to do. So, that was our philosophy.
World Wildlife Fund, of course, was almost exclusively an international
institution. It was active in Latin America, "iri Africa and Asia. It, too, largely
avoided stridency and confrontation. We worked in some countries with rotten
governments, with undemocratic systems, that we had to make peace with if we
were going to continue to operate. We worked through local institutions,
generally We tried to build up non-governmental organizations and local
pressure groups in many countries that lacked them. We did not, ourselves, go m
making noise to their public as Americans, but rather tried to get locals to study
and to appreciate their environmental treasures, in many cases, their wildlife, their
flora and fauna. We had access to decision-makers to a degree that most
environmental groups did not, simply because the organization was a worldwide
group with then 24—now, I think, 28—national organizations headed
internationally by Prince Philip, with significant people on most of the national
organization boards. So we had a good bit of influence.
For a conservation organization, we also had a fair amount of money and
resources. But, compared to the size of the problem or to what the economic
sector deploys, we didn't amount to a rounding error. I gave, again, with that
institution, a priority to bringing economics and the environment together. Our
flagship program there was something called "Wild Lands and Human Needs,"
recognizing that the traditional approach to protecting animals, of punching a hole
in the map or putting a fence around an area, wasn't going to work. Hungry,
needy, land-poor people can't be fenced out. Conservation must work for the
people the culture in which it finds itself. We had to find ways to accommodate
12
is i ; ; a |.i, ,.;!ii! •>.„', , j, i,11: a nil .. i I'ii'! ,„• ,;, , -,•!•' • , .• , .':"". ii,.: ,• ;,... , • . j i..; jiii.../ ik, \,.\.:.
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the very \egitimate development and economic demands of quite poor people who
were multiplying in number, who were often poaching in these parks 6r going in
for resources—like cutting down the timber or gold mining in Corcovado in Costa
Rica. People living near those great reserves had to gain by them, had to see them
as helpful to them. Very often we could do it—reconcile wildlife and human
needs—with programs like eco-tourism or agro-forestry. Timber could be
harvested in areas adjacent to important wildlife preserve's and cut and marketed
by cooperatives. The object was to help people exploit the resources of their own
environment but in a way that would allow them to continue to use and enjoy the
environment over the long term, while conserving a critical mass of species of
flora and fauna.
I heard this concept put very well by F'resident Salinas of Mexico a few
weeks ago. I accompanied him for three days as he was dedicating some new
reserves in Mexico. In the Yucatan, deep in the jungle, with the camppsinos as
his audience, he said,
This forest is very valuable. Tjie ancient monuments here
are valuable—not just because people pay good money,
which they do, to come see the monuments and enjoy the ;
jungle, as important as the money is—not just for the
wildlife, which is also very valuable, but it's not as
valuable as you are. The reason to keep the forest is that
out of the forest your ancestors and you have come. It has ;
sustained the ground-water under it, it has created and
made possible your culture and your society, and only if ;
you keep it will it continue to do so for the children of
your children.
I don't think I've ever heard a head of government speak so simply and
persuasively and eloquently to the nature-culture relationship as he did. People
believe him and that's one reason he's still popular in Mexico. That, essentially,
was my, much less eloquently put, vision for World Wildlife Fund when I was
there and one that I think we did a good bit to advance at that time.
MR. WILLIAMS: Before you came to EPA, what was your perception
of the Agency?
MR. REILLY:. You know, I didn't have a terribly good impression of
EPA before I went there. I think that I had been exposed to two kinds of
criticism. One is the stereotypical view held by much of the regulated sector,
which views EPA as: excessively concerned about small risks; highly
bureaucratic; ludicrously protective, sometimes; always overestimating threats to
health; not very responsive to economic concerns; and very insensitive to
13
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"T!
cost-effectiveness. I shared some of that view. I think I partook also of the
environmentalist critique of EPA, which is of a hide-bound, bureaucratic agency,
deeply scarred by the Burford years, risk-averse, wrought up in its own systems in
ways that cause decisions to take far longer than they should, unwilling to
embrace finality—partly for reasons of bureaucratic anxiety that if you keep the
decision going, you won't be subject to a nasty Congressional hearing or to
criticism. D.
I had lunch one day a couple of weeks before I was sworn in as bFA
Administrator with a veteran journalist, Guy Darst, an Associated Press reporter.
He had been around forever and had covered a lot of agencies and said, Well,
you're going to the best."
"Really?" I said, "That's not the view on the street."
"EPA will make five decisions in the amount of time it would take
Interior or Agriculture to make one, and they'd still screw it up. EPA is at the ^
intersection of science and public policy and economics and health," he said and
just has to keep turning out the decisions. There is no place to hide. That's the
function and that has made the Agency very good at what it does. It's very
sophisticated." ...
I must say, that was news to me at the time—that a very informed and
quite objective observer would have that judgment. That's the judgment I took
away from the agency-of a group of highly motivated professionals with a great
deal of elan. One often hears people criticize that zeal and sometimes, I suppose,
EPA may be guilty of having a bit much of it, but that's what makes it a joy to go
to work there. It's one of those agencies where you get invigorated walking down
the halls, not one where the adrenaline flows out your shoes after about 30
feet—and we certainly have those in the Federal establishment.
I remember a conversation with Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan one
day. He was talking about the difficulty that the Secretary of the Interior has
dealing with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Park Service. He said "You give
them an order and you have the feeling they're not going to carry it out until they
check with God. Whereas the Bureau of Reclamation, or the Bureau of Mines,
salutes and performs." Then he laughed and he said, "Oh, for a moment I forgot
who I was talking to. All you have is people who take their orders from God."
You know what he means, and that's true. EPA is a place with a moral fervor that
sometimes can be excessive. But, it is a place with commitment and, I think, a
great degree of professionalism. I tried to broaden its perspective, somewhat, to
make much more of economics, of prevention, of incentives rather than strictly
holding people to account for doing bad. I encouraged it to think about how to
motivate regulated industry, and about the whole larger world out there, the
international environment, to which EPA can be so helpful.
EPA's prestige rises almost directly in proportion to the distance one gets
from Washington. In the rest of the world, people do understand what many here
at home don't, which is, EPA is the place you go to for information about the
14
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environment, for criteria documents, for health information, for the best science
that we have on the health impact of pollutants,, and the way to set standards, the
best laboratory work on automobile pollution, and increasingly on a number of
other issues like indoor air pollution. EPA has more experience with remediation
of toxic contamination than any other agency in the world. These are all
cutting-edge problems—they require so little, relatively, of the U.S. government
to be deeply, lastingly helpful to South America, to Russia and Eastern Europe, to
China and Taiwan.
I can recall having sent two or three people to Latvia to deal with a spill
in a river that provided their drinking water—a spill of some stuff that the
Russians dropped in the water inadvertently but hadn't bothered to warn the
Latvians about, even though the age ofGlasnost had dawned. The Latvians
detected an unfamiliar odor and figured out they had a problem and did not want
Russian experts. We sent some professionals and I heard later from the Latvian
President that this was the most important American mission since Lindbergh's
visit there.
We helped Mexico when they had the big gas explosion,and fire in
Guadalajara; we sent a team to help Morocco cope with a big oil spill;; we did
those things, and buried the costs in programs. Our professionals returned
invigorated, were animated, energized by their encounter with a real need in
another country whose environmental problems are so much more egregious than
our own. Thus, involvement with helping others was very useful to the Agency
and a very inexpensive way for the United States to express what is one of the
most benign qualities of our culture, our environmental aspirations and
experience.
MR. WILLIAMS: You talked a bit earlier about the process by which
you became EPA Administrator. Could you describe that in more detail and talk
about what qualities President Bush may have sought in an Administrator and
any particular sponsors you may have had?
MR. REILLY: Well, you know, that history—I'm not sure I understand
it all. I know that in the summer of 1988, Russell Train, who was then Chairman
of World Wildlife Fund, hosted the Ruckelshauses' at his house in Hobe Sound,
Florida, I think in May or June. Not long after that he returned to say that he had
had a conversation with Bill Ruckelshaus. He quoted Ruckelshaus as saying, "If
our candidate George Bush becomes President, he's likely to turn to you and me
for advice about who should be EPA Administrator and my advice would be
Reilly. What would you think of that?"
Train, who just three years before had initiated with me a big merger of
The Conservation Foundation and World Wildlife Fund, with me then taking over
the organization as Chief Executive Officer, and him as Board Chairman,
obviously wasn't going to find it convenient to see me run off to government.
15
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Nevertheless, he told Ruckelshaus that he couldn't disagree. Upon returning from
•Florida, he told me of the conversation with Ruckelshaus and he asked, "What
would you do if that were offered to you?"
I said I'd say no.
I said I hadn't really completed what I had set out to do with WWF, there
was a lot of continuing work necessary to make our two institutions mesh. I
really liked what I was doing. I liked the international character of it. .And, I just
didn't know how serious George Bush would be about the environment, anyway.
So he said, "When a President asks you to do something, it's pretty hard
to turn him down. So I'd just like to ask you to think about your succession here,
how that would work, should this invitation come."
I didn't hear anything more about it until the day after the election.
Ruckelshaus called me up and said, "Would you like to do something in this
Administration?" He mentioned EPA Administrator and Interior Secretary.
I said, "No."
He said, "Well, if people were to talk to you, would you agree with me
not to turn it down or say no until you get in front of the President-elect because
he doesn't talk to enough people like you. If you have that encounter with him,
you can probably have some influence on his thinking early on, whatever you
do."
I think Ruckelshaus figured that if I ever got that close to the President, it
would be pretty hard to say no to him. My wife later told me that she decided the
previous June when she heard of the conversation with Train that I would do what
the President wanted me to do. She didn't see me saying no.
I remember a lot of our friends would say, "How was it that when hardly
any of your colleagues in Harvard Law School ever ended up in the Army, you
did?" She would point to me and say, "Patriot." It was true. I thought you should
serve. I came out of the Midwest and even though I didn't like the Vietnam War
much, I thought one served the country in the military.
And when I finally did get in front of the President-elect, I found it
impossible to say no to him. Someone had said to me in the transition—I guess
Bob Teeter finally got in touch with me and talked with me about what they were
looking for—and said, very frankly, that they were going to tilt one way at
Interior and another way at EPA and that I'd come highly recommended by
Ruckelshaus. I, however, went through that fall without any formal meetings
other than the one Ruckelshaus conversation where he said he thought they would
be getting in touch with me. They didn't call for at least a month or a month and a
half. Then I began reading that I was one of the two hot candidates under
consideration, but still no one had talked to me.
My friend, Phil Shabecoff, called me one day. He was the New York
Times environmental correspondent. He said, "I have it on very good authority
that you are on a short list of three. Do you know about this?"
"Nothing more than I read in the newspapers," I said.
. ' i '' i i !
16
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"That's very strange," he said, "this comes from a good authority. But,""
lie said, "there is something wrong with my EPA list."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Elizabeth Dole is on this list, and she's politically ambitious," he said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
He said, "Well, you'd never go to EPA if you had any political
aspirations. It would be the graveyard for those hopes." He talked about the
position, said it was an impossible job. He said that it requires you to master more
data and information than any job he'd ever covered. It's a thankless job. You'll
nake enemies, he said. You'll end up without any friends, probably, in your own
;ommunity and you won't make anybody else happy. He later changed his mind
ind said that he had reconsidered and that he should have encouraged me to go
:here.
I guess I was finally called in early December. I had a meeting with
Feeter and then was to meet with Craig Fuller, but he was ill. Finally, then, I was
invited to meet with President-elect Bush. I had about 35 minutes with him with
Craig Fuller present. At the end of that, he did riot offer me the job. He said he
wanted to check a few things first — although in the course of that conversation, he
lad asked Fuller, "Where do we stand on this?"
"It's ready to go, or," Fuller said, "you can talk to someone else if you
"That won't be necessary," Bush said.
The next day he called me up, he'd been trying to hold the secret,
>bviously. About ten or eleven he called me up and asked me to be his EPA
\dministrator and invited me to come over about two and said he would
innounce it in public and introduce me to the White House press corps. I told him
; would work to make him a great environmental President.
I never really knew a lot about his thinking, other than from one evening
n the Netherlands when Mrs. Bush and the Queen of the Netherlands were talking
it a State Dinner in the Netherlands and I was part of that conversation. Queen
Beatrice asked Mrs. Bush where they had found me. She said to the Queen, ""For
iPA,' George said, 'I want the best, nothing else. No politics, no partisanship,
ust the best we can find.1 Everybody said, 'Well, if that's what you want, Bill
leilly's the person you want to get.'" That could have been very generous on Mrs.
Push's part, but that's the sum total of my exposure to their thinking about it all.
I remember Train said that he thought I would get on very well with
3ush, that our temperaments would mesh well, and certainly they did. He and
vlrs. Bush were very generous, very kind, to my wife, Libbie, our children
Catherine and Margaret and me through all of that. They communicated even
vhen we had difficulties with the White House Staff. He had a fundamental
:onfidence in what I was doing and when things mattered a great deal to me, he
vould take them seriously. He always kept his promise to provide access when I
leeded it to talk to him and kept a promise to ensure that I didn't get anybody I
17
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didn't want in any of the key jobs. As some of the current Cabinet are
discovering, that is a very valuable commitment to have from the President and
very few people get it. But, I got it.
He did say to me at our initial interview, there wasn't any more money
for EPA and that the budget would not be going up. He asked what that would
do to my standing in the environmental community and whether I was prepared
for that In fact, we did a lot better than he had led me to expect we would
because we increased EPA's operating funds by 54 percent on our watch and the
overall budget by about 45 percent. That's a measure of Bush's support for which
he didn't get much credit during his term, though the League of Conservation
Voters later wrote approvingly of our budget performance.
MR. WILLIAMS: During that one hour meeting and subsequently, did
he or any of the While House staff give you Specific advice on what he expected
you to do or not to do at EPA ?
" " , ' ;!' "','„, ! ' ' I • ' " ! S11""
- MR. REILLY: No, and it's interesting that you don't necessarily get that
in top jobs. I don't believe my predecessors ever got a clear sense from their
President of that. Bush expressed his own philosophy. He said, "I'm not a rape-
and-ruin developer and I'm not for locking everything up, either." He said he
believed" in balance. .
That's really my philosophy. It's one of integration and reconciliation or
priorities. That's a philosophy I can subscribe to. It's really very close to my own.
I'm sure that's the way Ruckelshaus had characterized me to him. He seemed very
open to ideas when I talked to him. I remember that'I thought, "Well, I don't
know if I'm going to talk to him again or if I'm going to be offered or accept this
job, but I'm sure going to use my time well."
So, I told him about "Debt for Nature," which I had been working on for
two or three years, the concept of forgiving debt or writing down debt in hard
currencies, dollars, and having some portion of the forgiven amount being applied
to conservation in local soft currencies in the debtor country.
He said, "Well, that's a hell of an idea."
I remember thinking, "I've been working for three years on that and if I'd
just gotten the President of the United States to think that it was a good idea, I'd
really advanced the ball." Of course, it did reveal to me the enormous potential
power in access to the President and in the kind of job he was talking about my
taking. That certainly had an impact on me.
We talked about Cabinet status for the Agency. He was very frank and
direct and said he didn't support.it. He said that he thought there were too many
in the Cabinet and he wanted a lean Cabinet, a small Cabinet, but he was open on
the question. At one point he said, "Well, if we could do that in lieu of putting out
millions of dollars in new budget outlays, that might be a good trade." It was a
very congenial conversation.
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{JULY 29, 1993]
MR. WILLIAMS: Mr. Reilly, the last time we spoke, you described your
one-hour meeting with President Bush, as you were deliberating whether or not to
take the job at EPA. Can you describe now your top personnel?
MR. REILLY: I can recall that Bill Ruckelshaus had indicated to me
early on that there were two problems endemic to the White House-EPA
relationship. One was the OMB regulatory review relationship and the other was
personnel. I found that the promise that President Bush had made to me that there
would be no one I didn't want at the Agency, which obviously meant that we both
had a veto, was kept. It was hard slogging, there was a tot of negotiation. My
first nominee was Terry Davies as Assistant Administrator for Policy, he was, I
think, the lone Democrat in the crowd and he was the last one agreed to by the
White House. White House personnel simply held hostage Terry Davies until they
made sure the rest of the complement was to their liking.
I think that was a big mistake* and they came to regret it. It meant that
the Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation had no champion and was not
effectively represented in the formulation of the Clean Air Act. It might have
been a somewhat different Act had'they been included. The staff there was
somewhat critical of parts of it. But, as Counsel to the President, Boyden Gray
used to complain about not having OPPE involved in it, he was quick and
generous in acknowledging that it was his and the White House's fault. They
hadn't given me Terry Davies until the Clean Air Act had been forwarded to
Congress. :
Bill Rosenberg, a Michigan developer and former energy official in the
Ford Administration, came to me with the very strong endorsement of Bob Teeter,
tfho'd been central in the President's election. Rosenberg wanted to be Deputy, as
[ recall. Clearly his energy-and aggressiveness and imagination would be
/aluable to the new organization. But, his lack of EPA and environmental
;xperience did not, in my view, fit him so obviously for Deputy as for Assistant
\dmtnistrator for Air, which is where we put him. I thought his relationship with
Feeter would bode very well for our working with the White House and his
ibvious energy would be a wonderful asset in seeing through the first major
egislative program that we wanted. That proved correct, even though there later
vas considerable anxiety and hand-wringing about him in the White House. Fie
lid the job the President and I asked him to do and the President's domestic policy
vould have been much poorer without Bill Rosenberg. But he drew the lightning
)f resentment about our very strong Clean Air bill.
We chose LaJuana Wilcher for Assistant Administrator for Water. I can
emember she came to me with the highest endorsement of Senator Mitch
tf cConnell from Kentucky, who called to say that probably the Senator from New
or California or Illinois, frequently had candidates of great quality and
19 ;
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distinction to press upon a government agency head, but he had never had one, as
Senator from Kentucky, of the likes of LaJuana Wilcher. That got my attention,
so I agreed to see her, even though I had all but decided on a different candtdate, a
Congressional aide. •
I remember I asked her what she thought of my having begun the process
to review for possible veto the Two Forks Dam, a huge project in Colorado. She
looked very serious and paused and said, "I think it was a mistake." Well, you
can imagine that was one of the most controversial decisions I had made. There
was a very heated debate at that time within the Administration and in Congress
about what I had done and a great concern about it in some quarters in Denver and
other parts of the West. For the prospective Assistant Administrator for Water to
tell me to my face that she didn't agree with it, I thought was very brave and
interesting. I respected her independence and obvious integrity. Clearing her was
no problem because Senator McConnell had been,one of the two Senators who
had endorsed President Bush before the convention.
Tim Atkeson, the Assistant Administrator for International Activities,
was a name whom the White House had already cleared on a list for the job. He
was an old friend and colleague, much admired, of mine. I'd worked for him on
the Council on Environmental Quality in the early '70s. So that was an easy
choice.
'For General Counsel, I can recall, it came down to two candidates. One
was a lawyer with a New York City firm who, no doubt, would've done fine but to
me lacked drive, didn't look particularly imaginative or energetic. The other was
Don Elliott who was a very creative, positive can-do, law professor from Yale, an
expert on administrative law and very much interested in economic incentives and
pollution prevention and innovative new directions in environmental law. He was
someone that colleagues found sometimes abrasive and professorial. He gave
good service to me and I never regretted that choice. I thought he did an
• outstanding job. .
Don Clay was a career figure. He was about my fourth choice, frankly,
for Assistant Administrator for Waste. I was never confident that I could get him
through the White House. In the end, White House-Chief of Staff Sununu agreed
to his appointment reluctantly late one evening. Sununu called me the next
morning to say that he had changed his mind. I was able to say I had already
offered the job to Clay. I remember Sununu said, "Well, he's part and parcel of
that gang over there and I'm going to be watching him very closely. He's on
probation as far as I'm concerned. If he steps out of line over the next six months,
we're going to yank him."
In fact, Clay had built that marvelous air staff that Rosenberg wielded so
effectively. He'deserved a great deal of credit for that. He had the respect of
people inside the Agency and I thought would immediately be perceived in the
Congress as a non-political figure, a professional, which the Waste Office badly
needed, given the history of scandals in the early '80s". I thought he also
i
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imderstood the need for reform of some of those laws. He hadn't grown up with
them, he wasn't wedded to them, and he could rethink them. He also was a very
good manager and that's one of the most difficult offices in the place to manage.
Linda Fisher was Chief of Staff to my predecessor, Lee Thorrias. She
also had been Assistant Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Evaluation. She
had been very heavily involved in the reauthorization of the Superfund Law and
had made some enemies in that, as anybody who is effective will. She was
interested in international activities at the time, but I frankly thought that I wanted
a new face there. Someone not identified with the previous Administration
speaking for me internationally. But, I concluded that she would be very good at
Pesticides and Toxic Substances. I think she is outstanding and is qualified to be
a future Administrator. She knew the Agency well and was very effective. She
won the trust of everybody who dealt with her. She gave me some of the most
objective, and rational, and clear briefings of anyone. She was a key negotiator
on the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
She is a star.
The Deputy is a slot that the White House paid a good deal of attention
to and we actually had some arguments over it. There were a couple of
candidates that the White House pressed on me whom I did not find suitable. One
I'll tell you a story about. I didn't know the candidate personally and so I called
Al Aim, former Deputy Administrator of EPA, to ask if he knew this person. He
was in Boston at the time, in his office. He paused upon hearing the name and
said, "I have in front of me the Boston Telephone Directory. If I open it at
random and select a name, I will do a better job for you at finding a Deputy than
:he one you've mentioned." So, that took care of that.
I had interviewed Hank Habicht and thought that I wanted to find a place
for him at the Agency. I had known him somewhat previously—had come in
contact with him when he was Assistant Attorney General and then when Clean
Sites Inc. was looking for a new President. He very much wanted to be! Deputy
md I thought we had a very consistent understanding of the needs facing the
\gency and the role of the Deputy that I envisioned. I told the White House I
iidn't want their candidate, considered him weak and unqualified. The individual
lad some political support, but I wanted a real Deputy. They said, "Look, just
ake this person and keep him out on the road and have your Chief of Staff run the
Agency."
I said, "I don't want to do that. I want a genuine Deputy who knows the
)lace, who does the job, who is Mr. Inside, who is effective and respected, and
vho will work with me as a colleague." That's what I got in Hank Habicht.
Jeyond even my high expectations, Habicht proved outstanding. I think the
Agency came to see him, having had some reservations at first because of his
listory as Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan years, as a thorough-going
irofessional—insightful, sensitive, a very good manager, and a very bright
•rodder toward total quality management and toward reform of some of our laws.
21 '
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He also proved to be extremely good at negotiating with the White House. He has
a "i atEive, even temperament and an obvious knowledge of the tssues He
does his homework and speaks with quiet authority that is compelling There
have been a number of good Administrator-Deputy relationships goingj all Ae
way back to Bill Ruckelshaus and Bob Fri; and then Ruckelshaus and Al Aim,
to is in that league and I like to think is even better than that terrific record.
Hank obviously, is a future Administrator or equivalent, also.
The unsung hero of my Administration at EPA was Gordon Binder my
Chief of Staff. Gordon missed nothing, spotted problems and quietly fixed them,
shaped up personnel, alerted me to various Agency weaknesses or threats, and
faithfully communicated my views. -He was always objective, could tell me
unpleasant news, and had a masterly control of the paper flow. He had been with
me for 19 years and knew I liked a taut, congenial team, with no backbiting no
friction costs owing to petty competitive games. No one was more helpful to me
or to the Agency in the Bush Administration than Gordon Binder.
MR. WILLIAMS: What was your relationship to the White House?
The conflicts with the White House on policy matters started early.
Budget DirectorDick Darman, at the very first informational briefing that I gave
on the Clean Air Act, went ballistic and indicated that Ruckelshaus, as EPA
Administrator, had brought an acid rain proposal over to the White House> in
which fish from the Adirondacks were going to be valued at something like $20 a
fish. Now Reilly, if anything, has brought over something that is going to cost
twice that much, he said.
I said "There are a lot fewer fish, you should have taken the deal
Ruckelshaus offered you." That was the tone of our exchanges for that period.
He startled me because his opposition seemed so fundamental. I had rattier
assumed that-given the President's very public commitments to a Clean Air Act
with three parts, an acid rain title, an ozone-smog title, and an air toxics title-we
would all get behind that, get in harness, and produce such a bill.
The Budget Director philosophically disagreed with that and didn t hide
it He did not argue as though he considered that we were bound by those
promises. He doubted the seriousness of the air pollution problem in the United
States. It was a philosophy that [David] Stockman had also espoused-m fact, I
think Stockman had greatly influenced Darman.
Governor Sununu, I think, at the beginning had difficulty knowing quite
what to make of me. Obviously the Chief of Staffs job is a terrible job. It
involves taking responsibility for a very motley crew of people, whom you don
select who have relationships with the President, political histories with him, wh
" are valuable for one reason or another to constituencies, and making a success ou
of all that, getting some serious work out of that diversity. Sununu was quick,
bright and perceptive on a number of issues. He was very helpful to me in the
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tun up to our proposing the Clean Air bill. He asked good questions, knew the
utility industry very well, knew pricing policies, and was familiar with the acid
rain problem as former Governor of New Hampshire. He paid less attention to
other features of the bill and put Roger Porter in to oversee both our development
of the legislation and our Congressional shepherding of the law. Porter was very
constructive and positive, had endless meetings on the issues—wore people down
that way sometimes—and produced with us a very good bill. |
I think, looking back on it, it is a model on how public policy in the
executive branch ought to be developed. The originating Agency was EPA.
That's where the impressive conceptual work was done. The staff that Don Clay
had left behind in air had anticipated the need and had prepared themselves very
well for the day when clean air would be on the agenda. They had patiently done
the analysis, they had all the facts marshaled, and the bill that finally emerged was
in large part what they had written. The President was, himself, directly
responsible for the alternative fuels part of it. I learned during a visit to Rome
with the President how strongly he felt about alternative fuels and the need to
Dromote them.
The pollution rights trading concepts, which are so imaginative and
lovel in that law, came from a number of sources. It owes a lot, intellectually, to
Resources for the Future, work that had been underway there for 20 years. The
environmental Defense Fund had worked with Senators Wirth and Heinz on
'reject '88 and had advanced those ideas and had played a very important role
vithin the environmental community of giving them legitimacy and credibility in
i community that was very deeply suspicious of them. The Council of Economic
\dvisors, particularly Bob Halm, were very interested in those approaches and
messed that upon us, and the bill was a vastly stronger bill as a result.
The speed with which'we operated we owed to the staff at EPA. They
>ut us in a position to be able to run out so far, so fast. Had we not done that, had
ve waited until the other agencies were better organized, had their people in
)lace, which by and large they didn't, when we first began moving the Clean Air
^ct through, I doubt we would have produced as strong a bill. In fact, I used to
vonder if ever again in the Bush Administration, had we been given the go-ahead,
ve could have produced as complex and progressive a piece of legislation as the
?lean Air Act. It's one of those things that you get to do, I think, only in the first
rear, perhaps even the first six months. i
We had a very fast start, I remember—partly the consequence of
:nowing what we wanted to do coming in. We formulated right here in;this office
le concept—Terry Davies, Dan Beardsley, and I—of having EPA's Science
advisory Board review the major threats to health and ecology and then the
egree to which the Agency's programs responded to those problems. We got that
tarted as soon as we got to EPA. We began work immediately on the Clean Air
Let. The Regional Administrator for Denver brought in the Two Forks Dam issue
) me at my very first briefing. The Acting Administrator during the hiatus
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.'I ! ''
between Administrations was Jack Moore, and during those ^o w^tabe^een
Administrators he began the cancellation process for Alar; and that meant that that
was on my plate, so we quickiy moved to develop new food safety legislation
Z^'incorporating the lessons I thought I had learned from ti* experience.
We got the Agriculture Department, thanks to Secretary Clayton Yeutter,
mterested and supportive of that. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred just about
five weeks into my term. That, obviously, took a lot of our time and we then
began a follow-up to that. The Oil Pollution Act flowed out of that work and the
survey of all the h'arbors in the United States followed. We also got the Present
to commit the U.S. to phase-out ozone-depleting chemicals by the year 2000, and
we completed a review of Superfund. AH in the first six months.
It was an extremely busy, productive, exciting time. There was also the
international work. We made a commitment within those few months to embrace
a framework convention on climate change-something that Governor Sununu
and I worked out late at night in his office after we learned that yet another
negative story would appear the next day on the Administration's slowness to
appreciate this problem. The President was becoming impatient and concerned
and we made that commitment. .
On the one hand, one could say that there was confhct, certainly between
me and Dick Darman and, not infrequently, between the Chief of Staff, Governor
Sununu, and myself. But, I felt it was a productive period and part.cu ar y
credited Governor Sununu in that phase for accommodating the priority the
President had committed to and probably the Governor didn't really sympathize
with He once said to me, "I wouldn't do this, but we're not doing it for me, we
work for him." I always respected that about Governor Sununu. I think despite
our frequent encounters and differences of opinion, we respected each other
I in fact felt some affection for Sununu. I used to joke with him, he had
a sense of humor. Not many others did joke with him. I recall going to a ga*
station with him where we were dedicating a new methanol pump with the
President. I was concerned with trying to get more publicity for this aspect of our
program so I asked the Governor if he could step over so I could pour some
methanol on his shoe. I said that it would serve two advantages. One, it would
guarantee we got attention to the event—it would put us on the evening news.
And two, it would clarify to the country that methanol was, in fact, safe—that is,
if his shoe didn't erode off. ,
Well that's sort of a rambling answer to your question, but anyway, that
characterizes/! think, the first six to nine months of it-at least within the White
House itself. There also, I should point out, was a very good early relationship
with the President himself. I remember When I learned about the Exxon Valdez
accident I called Governor Sununu and said, "I'm going up there."
He said "I'll get back to you." He found Sam Skinner on a golf course
down in Florida and Sam agreed to cut short his Easter vacation and go up there
with me The Coast Guard, which had legal responsibility under law for the spill,
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was under him, as Secretary of Transportation. We went up and I can recall
having a somewhat different reaction to the experience than Sam did, partly
because I think he felt more need to defend the Coast Guard. From our initial
overflight I thought the response to the spill was woefully inadequate and
ineffective. All the protective booms were broken around the key rivers and
streams. The sea had been high the night before I got there. We had been told
that a dozen skimmer ships were at work. I only saw two and neither one was
working. They weren't suited to a major spill on open, turbulent water.
When we came back, I chose to tell the President exactly what I thought.
It occurred to me not to—I thought, he is an oil man, this is going to be distressing
to him. But I had remembered that I had reviewed the environmental impact
statement on the Alaska pipeline for the Council on Environmental Quality in
1971 or '72, and there had been predictions made that there would be this kind of
event. It didn't take a genius to realize that, statistically, one ship would
eventually founder. Given all the money that had been made o'n oil by both
Alaska and the oil industry, it seemed to me inexcusable that the capability to
respond and control such a spill was so poor. So, I said so and described the
history and what I had seen. I later learned thai: after leaving the room—I learned
from Richard Breeden who later became SEC Chairman but who was then a staff
member for the White House—the President turned to Governor Sunuhu and said,
"We're lucky to have him over there; that's one of the best things we've done."
Knowing that helps to explain why my relationships were as good as
they were with some other White House staff. The President not only liked and
respected me, but he made known to others that he did. So, whatever resentments
people may have felt about having an environmentalist on the team, and after all,
many of these people were veterans of the Reagan administration where the
environment was not taken seriously, it helped me both not just to stick around
but to be effective.
The President did any number of other things that were generous and
kind to my wife and me. He had us to dinner at the White House, to watch
movies, to some State Dinners—I think over the period I was in office I went to
five; I'm not sure any of my predecessors had been to one. I know my'immediate
predecessor had not. We were at Camp David a few times. The President was
just very generous, particularly to someone who had no history with him, who had
not been involved in the campaign, who had nol: been a party stalwart, who didn't
have a Republican constituency or certainly a White House staffer insider
constituency. That mattered a great deal. It particularly mattered when, the going
got rougher later. I think he probably knew that. Jim Cicconi, who was Assistant
to the President and managed the paperflow, told me that he felt that some of
those personal invitations were efforts by the President to compensate for what he
-------
bore the brunt of that. He consistently played the role of flak-catcher for me,
which was useful to me. But, he accumulated scar tissue in the process.
MR WILLIAMS: You said that early on your relationship with the
President was good You know that he ran on the platform-on the slogan,
amway-of being the environmental President. Of course, the environmental
press harpooned him for that later on. What is your assessment of President Bush
as the "Environmental President" that he styled for himself in the campaign?
MR REILLY- Looking back with as much objectivity as I can muster,
he kept his promise. You typically judge a President according to^three measures
on an issue like the environment: new initiatives, for which the Clean Air Act
must stand as a milestone—progressive, genuine response to the problem,
something that really will get most of the cities in the country into attainment
within the next ten years. Budget commitments—the President raised the
operating budget of EPA 54 percent and the budget overall about 45 percent at a
time when he didn't do that for other agencies. He was equally generous with the
Land and Water Conservation Fund and the environmental components of the
Interior Department budget. He increased waste clean-up funds in the Energy and
Defense Departments by several orders of magnitude. Enforcement is the third
area If a President is trimming or an Administration not on the level with the
environment, enforcement is where you'll see it. We set records for having put
more people in jail for environmental crimes on our watch than in the whole
previous history of the Agency. We also assessed more fines than in the previous
18-year history of the Agency.
We vastly increased the settlements under the Superfund Law precisely
because we were enforcing the hell out of that law. Finally lawyers counseling
Corporations changed the advice they were giving to their client companies and
said "You better settle with these people, they're coming after you.. I took 5UU
people out of one part of the program and put them into enforcement precisely to
create that effect and it worked. We ended up cleaning up Superfund sites at the
rate of one a week, which was meteoric compared to the previous history of that
program. •
I think that you have to credit the President, who also supported me on
the Two Forks Dam—it was difficult for him to do, it wasn't easy. He saw food
safety legislation go up to Congress that was anathema to the House Agriculture
Committee—it never went anywhere because of that, but was nevertheless
progressive and needed. Some of the international initiatives, like the Forest for
the Future program and the President's proposal at the 1990 Houston G-7 Summit
of a forest convention. Those are very significant measures, as are the three new
marine sanctuaries, the nearly 3,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers he
established, 6.5 million acres of wilderness, 52,1 think, new wildlife refuges, and
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20-some parks. From an environmental perspective, this was a very vigorous
Administration.
The decision to close down the California coast to further o:il and gas
development was very difficult for President Bush as an oil man who believed
that the technology was there and that society's needs had to be met with more oil.
These were important moves that should have worked better for him politically.
They didn't work well for him politically because there was an ambivalent, kind
of conflicted, body language that we communicated.
I think Governor Sununu and Dick Darman were, more than anyone
else—later Quayle and the Competitiveness Council—responsible for that. It
muddied the waters. They failed to communicate a consistent envirqnmentalism.
KIn fact, they seemed to be constantly skeptical about things environmental in their
remarks to the press and in their speeches. We were, and were perceived as, a
divided Administration, but our thrust was very environmental, particularly for
the first two years. When it didn't work for the President, and he began to be
challenged from the Right, and we also had economic problems, the President
distanced himself from his environmental record. He came to accept the Quayle,
Sununu, Darman view that there was no constituency for the environment that
offered him anything politically, and no public incentive or encouragement to stay
on the issue. Even for the Clean Air Act, he only got credit from environmental
group spokesmen after it was passed. For the 18 months it took to get it passed,
we took daily drubbings in the press because one part of it or another wasn't to
their liking or wasn't sufficiently "strong." They later acknowledged'it was a
significant law. Henry Waxman said it was owed to the two Georges, George
Bush and George Mitchell. But, that was a brief moment of glory in a long tough
slog. By then Sununu was aggressively negative on anything environmental.
Environmentalists had particularly vilified him as negative on the issue and he
was open in his contempt for them.
I think the environmental community failed to behave in a way that
rewarded environmental good conduct and thereby made a strategic mistake. I
cannot say with certainty that things would have come out differently, particularly
in Rio and on the international front had they played the President differently, but
I think they might have. Environmental groups simply created no rewards and
there were significant penalties out there in the form of both the bad press they
were generating and impatience on the part of the traditional Republican
constituency—of farmers' concerns about wetlands and businessmens' concerns
about regulation—that weren't offset by compensating new support or
encouragement.
MR. WILLIAMS: You mentioned Vice President Quayle and the
Competitiveness Council and [Richard] Darman at the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) and their less than environmental approach to matters within the
White House. What is your assessment of the whole concept of regulating the
27 :
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regulator through OMB processes or through sort of an ad-hoc Council on
Competitiveness?
MR REILLY- There is a function that some White House Agency must
play for the President of coordination and policing. It affects all agencies, or
should The fact is, the reach of EPA authority is such that it will affect energy
policy,'economic policy, development policy, housing policy, agricultural policy,
and it would be unreasonable to expect that an EPA Administrator alone ought to
be able to make those decisions.
Also a President wants to have some focus, some clear direction, some
unity in the way his Administration behaves and is perceived. It's necessary for
those two purposes, then, to have a coordinating body. However, the coordinating
body needs to respect the same principles that govern the Agency itself in making
particular decisions. ,
I was continually amazed that the kinds of contacts and information that
EPA was restricted in having, at least ex parte, other than on the record with notes
taken and memoranda prepared and acknowledgments in the record, went on
unconstrained by these rules all the time with people in the Executive Office of
the President. It was not uncommon in my time to get back comments from the
Office of Management and Budget or the Competitiveness Council that
incorporated verbatim lobbyist documents that we had seen from trade
associations three or four months before on particular matters of concern in
legislative or regulatory policy. That had a very demoralizing effect on EPA.
Finally;as this sort of thing came to the attention of Congressman Waxman and
others it resulted in unpleasant but very well publicized hearings.
' The lack of transparency in that Executive Office process and the
disregard for the regulatory procedures that we had built up, I thought,
undermined our credibility. They certainly contributed to a great deal of criticism
and suspicion. So, I think the function is necessary but it needs to be quite
specifically circumscribed, respect procedures everyone understands, and not
involve wholesale disregard for the kinds of constraints that affect a regulatory
agency.
MR. WILLIAMS: You mentioned having Bill Ruckelshaus and Russell
Train as significant mentors. Did you have an ongoing relationship with them
while you were Administrator; and what impact did their advice, such as they
gave you during that time, have on your thinking and the decisions you made?
,' . " 1 1 , , ' ' •.,""•! ",."i." * i" '
MR. REILLY: My relationship with Bill Ruckelshaus was episodic and
infrequent, principally because he was running a waste company. We did have a
breakfast one morning at the Jefferson Hotel at which I made a pitch to him that
he should chair a committee of the National Academy of Sciences on climate. A
whistle-blower at EPA later tried to get that encounter investigated on the grounds
28
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that I had probably engaged in something improper and Ruckelshaus had
probably lobbied me to do something that would benefit his company. That
experience made meetings alone with Bill Ruckelshaus somewhat risky for me
and I didn't have any more, though I did meet with him in the company of others
from time to time.
I often had lunch—I say often, probably every three or four
months—with Russell Train and always found him thoughtful and reflective. He
gave me some advice going in that I found vary useful. He said, You don't have a
lot of friends in this Administration, you don't have a history with these people,
you don't have a political constituency that will support you, so pay attention to
the press; they could become an important ally of yours. I think you will do well
with them. That will annoy the White House when they see you getting good
press, it always does, but it will also make them wary of you, cause them to
respect you, and it will give you more clout in conflict situations.
I took that advice quite seriously and it proved correct. That's just one
example of the kind of practical help that he was able to give me. I also solicited
his advice before I met with President Bush, then President-elect Bush, to talk
about going to EPA. Train encouraged me to try to obtain an assurance of access
and also control over personnel appointments to EPA. And then, I saw him
socially also through that time because we would have dinner from time to time
and, in his capacity as Chairman of World Wildlife Fund, he would have me back
for functions that they held.
I saw Lee Thomas just a few times, I think, and talked to him a few times
on the phone. He was constrained from calling me by the terrorizing ethics
briefing that is given to an Administrator before he leaves EPA that makes clear
that any initiative on his part to contact the Agency to do anything could possibly
result in his going to jail for it.' I don't think Lee called me for two years. I did
call him occasionally, and he was really an outstanding figure, I think an
underappreciated one, who kept the Agency together during a very difficult time
and did it quite well. EPA has been very fortunate in its Administrators. It, by
and large, is a classy group.
MR. WILLIAMS: How did you go about establishing a relationship
with EPA career staff, coming from a non-governmental organization?
MR. REILLY: When I went to (Assistant Administrator for Air) Bill
Rosenberg's farewell, I can recall, I believe it was Rob Brenner of the^air staff
who made a remark to me to the effect that you never made any distinction in
your time between the political and the career people at the Agency. You took
both of them into your confidence and all felt a part of the team. I was very
pleased to hear him say that because that's, in fact, what I tried to do. I can recall
one occasion when career staff kept me from doing something dumb when I
became angry at the White House and considered acknowledging that in
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testimony, and an Air staff member advised, "No, not before Congress. There are
other ways to do that if you decide it's a good idea."
I remember thinking later, one doesn't rely on career staff for that kind of
advice but they gave it to me. And of course it was correct. I felt they were quite
protective of me and loyal to me. I certainly tried to be both to them. They gave
good value consistently. They were very dedicated, very committed. I must say,
they certainly belie the stereotype that much of the country has of the Washington
bureaucrat. They worked very long hours and brought to their task a degree of
sophistication about the interplay of politics, economics, science and health that
made working with them intellectually very stimulating.
Apart from all of the power we had, apart from whatever impact we may
have had on history in my time, the experience itself of working with those
people those men and women, is one that was consistently exhilarating for me.
As far as my interaction with them, I can recall early on having 25 or 30 troop
into my office for a briefing and wondering whether this was cost-effective. In
the private sector, the meter would be running, of course, and it would be pretty
hard to justify that. I later came to conclude that it both was rewarding to them to
see the Administrator finally get the issue on which they might have spent several
years of their lives and also was an extremely effective way of communicating
within the Agency. It multiplied the people who heard the message directly and
could repeat it. So, I used those meetings—often asking questions, the answers to
which I knew, and probably more often asking questions, the answers to which I
didn't have a clue.
I also used to enjoy sometimes some of the old crocodiles there who had
been around a while and knew all the answers watch me in a briefing just
gradually come to some level of understanding so that I could ask a certain
question and I'd almost see in their eyes, "Oh go6d, he's reached the primary level
of comprehension here, so we'll reward him with an answer." We had a good,
humorous, I think, congenial relationship. I came to respect them a great deal. I
-think they understood that and appreciated it.
Their largest deficiency was the result of their beleaguered history,
which had resulted in limiting their openness and involvement with much of the
outside world, with the most innovative segments of the business community, and
with other countries. I tried to broaden their horizons, and open them up a bit.
t si;
MR. WILLIAMS: How would you define your management style?
• ., !
MR, REILLY: My management style was to work very hard to ensure
that I had the right people in the right jobs and that they understood me and how I
like to proceed. I believe very strongly in loyalty and in openness. I have no
patience whatever for back-biting or for staff working at cross purposes with each
other. I think conflict within an institution that itself is subject to a lot of exterior
pressure and criticism can be very costly. The friction costs ofhaving a
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son-of-a-bitch on the staff are very high and almost never worth it, no matter how
good the son-of-a-bitch, so I try to weed them out. I like personal congeniality
and smarts. I really value frankness. I try to make it painless for people to bring
bad news to the boss and I often ask questions to elicit it, to see if there is any,
even if it's not brought to me. ;
I believe in delegation—really believe in it. I think that people ought to
be allowed to make mistakes and if they're good, they'll learn from them. An
Agency as large as EPA, if it does not delegate, will become very slow to make
decisions and actions. To the extent that decisions funnel up to the top, they will
get focus and high-level attention and maybe eventually priority, but they will
also require time. There is no way that you can put that many decisions on the
plate of an Administrator and expect the daily lives of Americans to benefit from
prompt solutions to their problems. I believe that with respect to the Regional
Administrators as well. I was a little surprised, frankly, to find the degree of
delegation at EPA when I got there. It is one of the most decentralized agencies
of the Federal government. Since you're dealing with so many location-specific
problems, that is probably inevitable^but it is unusual. It used to be upsetting to
some other agency heads or Congressmen who didn't quite understand that a
decision that they wanted to influence would be made in the field. They didn't
understand why I just wouldn't pick up the phone and order that some.thing be
done in a certain way. Well, if you respected the structure that we had, you had to
trust it to produce the right consequences. Generally speaking, I did and didn't
interfere that much, other than to ensure that the right criteria and priorities were
being applied and the processes being respected in the field.
There were exceptions to that. I reversed my Regional Administrator on
the Two Forks Dam. I also withdrew authority from my Regional Administrator
in Chicago to oversee wetlands implementation in the state of Michigan where I
thought more discretion should have been given to the one state to which that
authority had been delegated. Those were rare decisions, quite unpopular in their
regions—in some quarters of their regions. Reaction among the Denver Region
staff to my action on Two Forks Dam actually was mixed. There were a lot of
EPA staff in Denver who thought that was the right decision, but there were some
who certainly didn't. :
Finally, I believe in a clear exposition of purposes and priorities, to focus
energies and to ensure coherence. It's also vital to morale and Agency
effectiveness for everyone to understand what the key objectives are. I think my
own management style is one of trying to create a sense of purpose and
significance and even excitement and hoping that that will be infectious. Trying
to dignify the effort which, after all, if you're protecting peoples' health and their
ecology, shouldn't be that difficult. And then, letting good people get on with
their work. I necessarily had to protect them from the Congress or the White
House from time to time and didn't mind that; they were worthy of it.
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MR. WILLIAMS: How did you and Hank Habicht carve out your
respective roles as Administrator and Deputy?
MR. REILLY: We came to a working understanding early on that on
certain issues, I would be very personally involved—certain issues that either I
cared about particularly or that would not be moveable to the same degree absent
the Administrator. Those issues included the Clean Air Act and controversial
regulations, the Two Forks Dam decision, the Exxon Valdez and follow-up,
wetlands regulation, our international activities, the North American Free Trade
Agreement, and, I suppose, our food safety initiative.
There was nothing, however, that Hank was discouraged from getting
into. I particularly encouraged him to get into the whole area of risk
characterization and systematizing the way that we assessed risk within the
Agency. He, himself, picked up on the management issue and became a prophet
of total quality management. He saw the things that I was not doing and was
quick to pick up on them.
' He and I met regularly—sometimes .in meetings we set and lunches that
we tried to hold fairly frequently, weekly or bi-weekly; other times just before our
early staff meeting in the morning or after it, or in the course of the day. My door
was always open to Hank. He just freely came and went. There was nothing that
we couldn't talk about. He also had a very good sense of when to do something
on his own, and when to tell me he was going to do it, and what those things were
that he could act on with his own initiative and just tell me after the fact. He
knew my philosophy and what I cared about. I thought we had one of the most
congenial Administrator-Deputy relationships I had ever seen. That owes a great
deal to his sensitivity, too.
I traveled a great deal, I probably traveled a third of my time. I think my
predecessor told me he averaged one day a week out of the office; I probably
averaged two. Hank was quick to pick up the loose ends that necessarily got left
and generally make sure that our agenda was moving forward. He made sure the
initiatives that he knew I cared about were getting a proper degree of attention and
priority-that the White House was being mollified or snags that came along were
addressed.
It was a very easy relationship. We saw the world, I think, quite
similarly—the needs of the Agency, both the importance of protecting its
regulatory integrity, of restoring to some degree its public image, of really
strengthening internal morale, which had not been great throughout the 1980s,
and of leading some reforms to introduce more science and economics into
Agency thinking. He had had more experience than I with the programs, having
been Assistant Attorney General, and so often knew more about specific issues
than I did but was always very modest and unassuming about his knowledge. I
think in retrospect, he was a very astute observer of what! was not doing and was
quick to pick up on it and do it. In some cases I encouraged him to take on certain
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things, in other cases he just recognized that they needed doing and did them. It
was, fundamentally, a relationship built on a lot of mutual respect. ;
MR. WILLIAMS: You talked about your agenda and you set ten goals
or themes when you first came to the Agency. How did you come to choose those
particular themes to concentrate on? ;
MR. REILLY: Well, some of them I thought were relatively obvious. I
have a long history of promoting non-confrontational, consensus-building
solutions to environmental problems. The time was right for that. The adversarial
approach has been very costly to this country and to the extent that you- can find
ways that do not frustrate the fundamental objectives either of the regulated sector
or the public-at-large and some of their interest groups, environmental
organizations and others, that makes sense. Hence, my emphasis on voluntary
programs, the incentives to pollution prevention, the safer pesticide initiative, the
33/50 program, Green Lights, the Environmental Leadership Program, and Design
for Environment. AH of those things tfiat reward good behavior rather than
simply punishing bad behavior were, I thought, the kind of things that Bush put
me there to do. He mentioned my history as a conciliator and as someone who
tries to build bridges across the divides when he swore me in.
The international agenda was something that mattered personally to me a
great deal. I thought that the United States could be of enormous help'to the rest
of the world for very little outlay in an area where we led the world, at a time
when other countries were beginning to address a backlog of environmental
problems. So, that initiative seemed logical to rne.
The elevation of ecology was something that I cared about and it was
also a recommendation of the Science Advisory Board. I thought, frankly, that a
major priority EPA had been conceived to uphold, of protecting the natural
systems of the country, had been somewhat diminished, historically, in favor of
protection of public health, and I wanted to restore that balance. Two Forks
served that purpose very well. So did our national estuary program and our
aggressiveness on wetlands and my proposal for a world convention on forests.
We increased the annual budget for regional areas—for the Great Lakes,
Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, San Francisco Bay, the Gulf of
Mexico—from $40 to $700 million plus. Our budget for wetlands went up very
considerably. There were a number of reasons for that. One, frankly, was that
people care about, even love, some of these places, the Chesapeake Bay or the
Great Lakes. They don't love emissions controls or effluent limitations or
reducing parts per million of benzene. It's very hard to communicate some of
those things to the public as it is to the President. It's not so difficult to
communicate what you're doing to protect the Chesapeake Bay and why that
matters, even though it may all go to the same purpose.
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Thinking in terms of-special places forces you to integrate things, so it
also served another one of my priorities, which was to promote cross-media
attention to problems. I had become concerned that in the fragmented history and
Congressional oversight structure of the Agency we had built walls between our
treatment of air, water, waste, and the rest. We .didn't have the authority to break
down all those walls-because the statutes are different, the traditions are different,
the expectations and requirements of the laws are different, even the risk
methodologies are different. But, some of those, by heaven, I thought we could
break down. The risk assessment methodologies was one of them, and we did.
We tried to get the same risk characterization for air as for waste as for pesticides,
or at least to clarify when we weren't and why we weren't.
The environmental equity priority is one that responded to a growing
concern that was very deeply held by a lot of poor people and a lot of minorities
in our country—by people on the Indian reservations and in the urban ghettos and
in some very poor rural communities. There is a sense, and it's true, that these
people suffer more environmental assaults, on average, than those who live in
affluent neighborhoods. To some degree, this is a consequence simply of
purchasing power, and we can't protect against it entirely. The land values will be
lower and so rents will be less in places where air pollution is more severe. But,
to the extent that waste facilities really are sited where political clout is least, and
where people are most powerless or have the least capacity to understand what
they are getting, which has been true of some of the Indian reservations, I thought
that was EPA's responsibility to get into, even though we didn't have location
control authority in most of our laws. So, we took that on seriously and I think
moved it forward.
The concept of applying risk to our laws was simply the outcome of a lot
of thinking that had gone on and was popularized first by Bill Ruckelshaus,
particularly, that we needed a language that was common to the Agency and
would allow us to prioritize better than the kind of episodic political noise that
accompanied the discovery of the Valley of the Drums or Love Canal and that
typically set the agenda, and determined priorities. It was a necessary template, I
think, to apply to environmental priority setting in the United States. It was also a
good'shield with which to defend the Agency when charges would come up that
one or another of our responsibilities was not being kept, or some milestone was
missed, if we could say we were attending to the important business as determined
by the scientific community, based upon their assessment of comparative risk.
Our priorities complemented one another. They stood together. I've
been pleased that they haven't been undone by my successor. Some of them have
been renamed, but I think they are still going forward. I believe, I like to believe,
at least, that we won the adherence of the professionals for those priorities, that
we legitimized comparative risk assessment, and market-based programs like
pollution-rights trading, and also the voluntary programs, on our watch.
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We spent a lot of time thinking about total quality management (TQM)
and how you improve service and morale, how you improve quality of regulation
and of attention to the regulated sector, to clients, so to speak, in a service
institution. There was a good deal of skepticism about that, but I think by the end
we had made some in-roads. So many people had had TQM training and had
begun to see that it's really just another name for common sense and respecting
your peers and not duplicating effort, and delegating when you can, and not doing
things more than once.
I remember we had one senior priority-setting meeting in Maryland
where there was a revolt against my having laid on too many priorities. Linda
.Fisher told me a story not long ago of my smiling when this point was made to me
by some hapless candidate who was chosen to come forward with the bad
news—this is a case where I certainly didn't punish bad news, I just didn't believe
it. I didn't really agree with it. In my remarks I said, "There will be more
initiatives, this is not a custodial era in EPA's life. There have been such eras, but
we enjoy a moment of opportunity that must be characterized by creativity and
imaginative new ideas. Therefore, it .makes sense for us to have these initiatives,
and I don't promise there won't be more." Linda said, I put it less graciously in a
note that she saw and that I had given to Gordon Binder, my Chief of Staff, when
I left the room on that occasion. The note she saw, he showed her, read, "Kick ass
and take names, Gordon, there will be more initiatives."
Well, I have always believed that the Agency has been strongest, most
effective, also most exciting to work in when it was moving forward, when it had
ideas, when it was making policy, when it was promoting and initiating and
framing the debate and not reacting. That's what it seemed to me the times called
for and we had an opportunity, however brief, to enjoy it. That's called rising to
your moment.
[October 1, 1993] :
. MR. WILLIAMS: // occurs to me that in the '70s, a number of
environmentalists were concerned that risk assessment was a means by which
industry watered down environmental legislation, watered down environmental
mandates—I've read some material that seemed to imply that. What changed
during the '80s and then during your tenure in the later '80s that made risk
assessment something that the Agency was using to further its environmental
mandate, its environmental goals?
MR. REILLY: There was an attitude towards risk assessment, and still
is, in some environmentalist circles and in some parts of the Congress, some
important ones, that regard risk assessment in about the same way that the
traditional environmental establishment regards dilution as a means of pollution
control. That is, you work down to the level at which you will tolerate death and
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disease and set a restriction there, set a tolerance or a pollution standard there, that
isn't too costly. I can recall during the Thomas Administration at EPA there was a
very negative exchange on public radio, as I recall, where someone alleged that at.
EPA people were actually trying to calculate the number of acceptable deaths due
to a particular carcinogen. The attitude reflected in that radio program's
excoriation and caricature of Thomas' approach to risk posits the possibility
ultimately, of zero risk and regards zero risk as the ideal towards which we should
work That has tremendous appeal. There is no question but that one would like
to live in a society that is risk-free, or at least render that part of it to which we are
involuntarily exposed free of risk—the chemicals that come on our food, the
pesticides that are used on products that we consume, the air that we breathe and
the water we drink.
I think that the concept of risk assessment and then risk management,
that is of trying to determine a level of practical achievable control, gradually
gained currency as a consequence of two things. First of all, the Agency dealt
with many more problems than it used to, as a consequence of a whole plethora of
legislation that was added to its responsibilities in the 70s and '80s—the Toxic
Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, the Superfund
Law. The result of this was to cause even the most idealistic and protective of
EPA staff to realize, we can't do it all. We have got, ourselves even, to make
some allocation of our resources, given the fact that there's more for us to do than
we can do The Congress never came through with sufficient funds, nor did
Administrations typically request them, truly to allow all of the responsibilities
carried by that Agency to be borne.
Secondly, the technology of detection advanced very significantly.
Within a space of a few years, we went to the possibility of detecting not just parts
per million but parts per billion and even in some areas, parts per quadrillion, as
detectable, though admittedly trace, amounts of particular chemicals. This began
to pose the problem of, as Senator Moynihan once said to me, "Well, knowledge
is sorrow, really." To the degree that we understand that there are trace amounts
of carcinogens on our food from pesticides, or even in natural products like coffee
or peanut butter, we ourselves have to acknowledge that we are making these
choices and tradeoffs of the kind that the public radio criticized..
I think this throws everything into somewhat greater relief. It certainly
requires a more mature accommodation of reality. It also reminds us that some of
these pollutants are facts of life. They are in the environment, many of them
irrespective of human alteration and manipulation. Ultimately, you will find, for
example, arsenic, which is a naturally occurring phenomenon, in common food
products, once detection is fine-tuned enough. That forces you to acknowledge
that what you need is some reasonable method for predicting levels of real impact
on humans so that you can protect people to an adequate standard. The ideal is to
ensure through regulation that such inevitable risks are negligible, i.e., that they
would not over a lifetime of anticipated exposure in a real world situation result in
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more than one excess cancer death in a million people. Zero risk is a chimera, a
beckoning illusion. To try to achieve it would consume unjustifiable amounts of
resources, and entail forgoing much progress. Tolerating a certain trace level of
pollutant in certain circumstances, is more than offset by gains to health that you
can get with the freed-up resources. We have probably way over-emphasized
cancer, for example, in regulating for pollution control in the United States, to the
neglect of tilings that cause neuro-toxic problems in fetuses, developmental
problems, brain development concerns that have nothing to do with cancer.
I think that when you realize that in some instances you would be better
able to protect society against a larger problem in gross if you didn't deploy a
disproportionate amount of your resources on what is a much smaller problem, it
causes you then to get into the realm of risk assessment and risk management.
The regulator, then, is in fact, however, doing nothing different from what you
and I do every day. We decide to walk as opposed to take the car someplace or
ride a bicycle or maybe do something a little more dangerous like ride a
motorcycle or scuba dive. The difference, of course, is that some of those risks
we choose for ourselves. There is a popular preference that government should
try to absolutely eliminate those risks we do not have direct control pver, that
people don't voluntarily choose. It can't be done.
Risk assessment, I think/has gained currency as a consequence of a very
large set of responsibilities that forced prioritization. Secondly, the discovery that
we cannot provide perfect security for everyone at all times. Again, as Senator
Moynihan once put it, "Well, life really is about risk and it ends badly."
MR. WILLIAMS: Using risk assessment opens the door to dealing with
ecological risks overall instead of just the ho-w-much-pesticide-do-ydu-have-on-
our-apple sort of thing. And looking at your tenure, it seems that the Agency
moved more and more towards an ecological approach, maybe an ecosystem
approach, of environmental management. It seems to me that the Agency has
come full circle, in a sense, in that it inherited certain organizations like the
Federal Water Quality Administration in the '70s that had been doing watershed
management for many, many years—and moved towards that end-of-pipe
approach and more industry-specific approaches—and now it's moving back
again towards ecosystem management. Why do you think it's come full circle that
way? Why do you think it took 20 years or 25 years to determine that maybe this
ecosystem approach, or watershed approach, was truly valuable?
MR. REILLY: Well, the environment is a matter of more than health.
Health certainly is very important, but the concept underlying the establishment of
EPA was the Environmental Protection Agency. It posited an integrity of our
natural systems of which we are a part and said to keep an eye on all of them. I
think that the Agency has placed the emphasis in different areas at different times,
but certainly in the latter '70s, the emphasis shifted to health.' It's difficult to argue
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against emphasizing health. However the consequence of that, I think, was to
create a certain imbalance in the Agency.
We, in my watch, tried to reassert the priority for ecological systems,
particularly in view of the fact that the best scientists we could consult, who make
up the Science Advisory Board, told us to. They told us that some of the major
threats to the environment in the United States were, in fact,-ecological—upper
atmospheric ozone depletion, climate change, forest fragmentation, species
[OSs_all of these properly the concern of an environmental agency like EPA. We
didn't, however, for a moment have the kind of budgetary resources deployed in
accord with those priorities. SAB said, "Raise the ecological priority of the
Agency" It was a very welcome message to me. I went into the Agency
believing that was important to do. We strengthened the budget for special
ecologically significant systems like the Great Lakes and estuaries and wetlands
systems.
I think there is a second reason, however, for attending to ecology. As
compelling as it can sometimes be to talk about health, we have provided a very
high degree of health protection for the people of the United States. In my view,
the health of our citizens has improved significantly over the life of EPA—not
certainly as a consequence only of what EPA has done, but of what it has
improved. You cannot say the same thing about a number of ecological systems.
Certainly through the Clean Water Act expenditures we have vastly improved
some of our major water bodies, particularly the Great Lakes. We still do not
have a handle on nitrates in the Chesapeake Bay nor nutrients in the Long Island
Sound We have substantial areas that are dead in those water bodies. Forty
percent of the Gulf of Mexico shellfish beds are off limits at any one time because
of pollutants that flow off the land. That really has always struck me as
scandalous. I don't think we will be able to say, in the popular phrase of the
moment, that we have attained a sustainable level of development until we
function in harmony with these ecosystems arid learn to keep them productive.
The public gets that, I think, to a surprising degree. One problem EPA
has always had, particularly when it's communicating about health and pollutants,
is a difficulty making clear to the public what the issue is. We complicate that
problem ourselves by developing language that is so opaque as to defy penetration
even by some specialists and often, I think, has led the public to think, there is
something that is going on here; this is a trick to keep us out of the game. We are
not, nor ought to be, fundamentally about reducing this effluent or that emission,
but rather about protecting the totality of the environment. If you talk in those
terms and Identify places like the Chesapeake Bay or the San Francisco Bay or the
Great Lakes, people get it. Those are the places they love, that's the way they
understand nature, the outdoors, the environment. So, it's a way to reach the
people and engage them in your work.
I always felt that education about the Agency's mission, about the state of
the environment, about the choices the country had, was among the highest
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priorities I respected and the language to communicate about the environment is,
in my view, more properly, ecological than health.
MR. WILLIAMS: CEQ has ployed a predominant role in protecting
areas, at least geographically—by focusing people's attention on ecological
management in these areas through NEPA, using environmental impact
statements, and that sort of thing. You have no doubt heard the Clinton
Administration wants to abolish CEQ, setup a smaller office in the White House
and then transfer—depending on which day you listen, I guess—those functions
into EPA. What's your opinion on that?
MR. REILLY: This nation and this government so badly needs systems
that integrate a variety of policy concerns that different agencies have that I
consider it a profound mistake to eliminate CEQ. Many of us worked for years to
try to get an understanding of the need to have better coordination for
environmental protection, which after all involves your reaching out to
Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, HU4D, and other agencies. CEQ can do that;
that's its very modus operendi. That's the concept under which it was established.
EPA can try to do it and has to do it sometimes, but as one more agency, and not
even a cabinet agency at that, it's a little more difficult.
There is a.provision of the Clean Air Act, Section 309, that gives EPA
the right to involve itself and make judgments about other agencies' conduct and
behavior. It's not a very popular thing when EPA does it. And yet, an agency in
the White House that both has cross-cutting responsibilities as part of its charter
and also is free of the day-to-day administration of the laws to look long-term is, I
think, a very important asset to Presidents who want to use it..
The problem CEQ has had is that Presidents have neglected it. It's not
been given the kind of role that it might have, unfortunately. The Bush
Administration chose not to put into CEQ some of the major environmental issues
that in the Nixon Administratio'n would have been lodged there, such as the
coordination of wetlands policy. To have given that kind of issue, essentially, to
the Competitiveness Council, in my view, fore-ordained the kind of acrimony,
ideology, and conflict that we encountered.
It's not sufficient simply to set up a CEQ and assume that it will have the
kind of influence that the statute contemplates;. The head of the agency has to
have a relationship with the President, has to be able to influence other White
House officials, and has to be deferred to by the President in a way that suggests
that they are to be taken seriously. But if you have that, and we certainly had it in
the Nixon Administration and also, I think, in the Carter Administration with the
kind of work that was done on The Year 2000 Report, whether one agrees with the
conclusions or not, that is a classic achievement of a White House council charged
with taking the long view and looking beyond the turf of any one agency. With
CEQ gone, where is long term forecasting to be done?
39 :
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, " 'i ! , • ' , ' IN !* 'II |i' : ill1',,
I don't think that moving some of those functions directly into the White
House into the domestic policy council or" the domestic staff of the President is a
sufficient or reassuring replacement for CEQ. They will be more political. They
will be more subject to other pressures directly in the White House. They will be
more episodic in their capacity to identify issues and characterize them and focus
attention on them as they do or do not get a priority from the President. Even in
the time when it might be in the desert, so to speak, as an Agency in the eyes of
the Chief of Staff or the President, CEQ nevertheless has its NEPA
responsibilities, its statutory functions, its responsibility to report on
environmental conditions and trends, its interagency coordination role—which in
our administration it tried to exercise with respect to water contracts, for example,
and, I thought, made a contribution. I don't believe it's a good idea to eliminate
CEQ and transfer the NEPA oversight functions to EPA.
. MR. WILLIAMS: With regard to the idea of cross-cutting and maybe
EPA not being quite the place to do that in government, how would you
characterize, during your Administration, the Agency's relationship with other
natural resource based agencies in the government—Agriculture Department,
Interior Department, and the various bureaus beneath them?
MR. REILLY: We had excellent relations with the two agencies that
EPA ordinarily conflicted with, the Corps of Engineers and the Department of
Agriculture, particularly during the first two years of the Administration.
The Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, Bob Page, was
very sensitive to environmental concerns, courageous in the face of criticism he
received from people in the White House and in Congress for taking wetlands
protection responsibilities seriously, constructive in working with me and others
concerned about wetlands. As a result, I thought we had a relatively contention-
free period and were able to make some progress.
The same was true for the Agriculture Department under Secretary
Yeutter. He and I, early on, worked on the Alar issue and both of us came to see
that the pesticide law was flawed. What the Agriculture Department really wanted
in the way of a new pesticide law was uniformity of application so that we
wouldn't have 50 states going their own way setting different pesticide tolerance
levels! 1 thought that a reasonable proposition, provided that you are dealing with
chemicals you have registered recently—that have been subjected to all the
modern scientific testing. So, I conceded that point in return for the Agriculture
Department supporting me in getting a cleaner faster cancellation authority than
existed under current law.
Presently, absent a very high standard of emergency, the EPA
Administrator, after years of research and analysis, can start the process of
removing a chemical from commerce. But, even after the decision is made at
EPA and it goes out of the building, it is subjected to de novo administrative
•;" ' . '. ' ' ' ' ; 40 :
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hearings and then, inevitably, judicial review all over again which can take 2, 4, 6
years. That is profoundly destructive of public trust and confidence in
government when you realize that the cancellation decision is based on a
considered judgment that the chemical causes a problem—it has carcinogens at a
level that is intolerable. How then explain why you're allowing it to continue to
be used? Yeutter understood that and so together we proposed pesticide law
reform. We were not successful because, I think, in the absence of a decision
overturning the Delaney clause, which since has occurred, the House Agriculture
Committee, particularly, saw no urgency. It was not unhappy with the pesticide
law. Conservatives did not want to increase EPA's cancellation authority, and
liberals did not want to abandon the Delaney clause's zero carcinogen prescription
for processed food in favor of a negligible risk standard, which we also were
proposing, as the National Academy of Sciences had recommended.
One thing that triggered, I think, a readiness in the Bush Administration
to support reform, was my own position after Alar that I would riot again stand up
and reassure the country that the food supply was safe when EPA had acted to
remove a chemical, unless we could promptly get that chemical out of commerce.
That was the position I, and many of my predecessors, had been put in after
making a cancellation decision. I just said, "Next time, I won't do it."
Yeutter also embraced EPA and environmental concerns in the
preparation of the 1990 Farm Bill. He was very clear with me early on. He had
encountered an unprecedented amount of concern for the environment as he made
the rounds of his Senate confirmation committee members and he said that was a
big change since he had last been at USDA. He realized that our support for any
farm bill would be important to him; it would matter to Senator Leahy, the
Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and others. He said, in return for
our giving that support, he was willing to pull EPA right into the process, have us
as central participants, which we'd never been, in the evolution and development
of the farm bill. As a result, we got the most environment-sensitive farm bill we'd
ever had. So, our relationships were very good. They were not as good after
Secretary Yeutter left. And then the recession began to hit and there was a greater
concern for the politics of the environment, and a sense that the issue wasn't
playing as well for the Administration as it might have.
Our relations with the Interior Department were, I think, on the whole,
congenial. I got along personally with Secretary Lujan very well. We; as he often
pointed out, had different constituencies and were responding to different groups,
which he characterized as clients. I thought that the Fish and Wildlife Service and
the Park Service relationships to EPA on wetlands and air pollution, respectively,
were very successful and productive. In the evolution of the Clean Air Act,
Secretary Lujan reflected a point of view of concern for coal contracts and for the
developmental side of his.brief, which, I think, the President and others fully
understood he would in making him Interior Secretary. We all understood that
and accepted that.
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We did have a serious disagreement over the Endangered Species Act. I
thought one could make a case for systemic reform of the Act but not for
exempting application of the law on less than 2,000 acres of old-growth timber in
Oregon which was habitat for spotted owls. I thought the suspension of the
Endangered Species Act for that.small tract was purely symbolic and negatively
symbolic. It was something that was not going to preserve or create any jobs and
was unlikely to destroy any owls, it simply was firing for effect. I angered a
number of people in the Administration, and probably Secretary Lujan, when I
chose to be the only member of the team who voted against, in public, the
suspension of the Act in that case. But, given the kinds of issues that EPA has, I
thought our relations with other members of the cabinet were generally
surprisingly cordial.
We fought very hard.with the Energy Department on specific Clean Air
Act implementation regulations and that received some publicity, some attention,
and yet there was much less attention paid to the fact that I had an excellent
relationship with Secretary Watkins, as did my staff on cleanup of Federal
facilities—at least after we got over his anger at our criminal investigators having
broken into Rocky Flats one night without having warned him. He and I agreed
early on that he would support my proposal fora 10-million-ton sulfur dioxide
reduction in the Clean Air Act in return for a concession he wanted, which was to
grant an extra three-year extension for clean coal technology, which I did.
I thought, by and large, those relationships Were probably less troubled
than they had been in previous EPA Administrations—largely because the
President had campaigned on the promise to be the environmental President and
had shown by a number of decisions, early decisions, particularly, that he wanted
the issues and me and EPA to be taken seriously. His coming to the Agency
headquarters building, the first President who ever did, to swear me in was a very
important gesture. It wasn't lost on anybody. The number of Senators, the
number of members of Congress, the number of Ambassadors who were present,
I'm sure, to some significant degree because the President, himself, was going to
do the honors, helped us a great deal.
1 I ... ^ ,
MR. WILLIAMS: How would you assess your relationship to
Congress?
MR. REILLY: I had a relationship with Congress that I thought was
productive in some areas, certainly in the Senate more than in the House when
you consider the controversially of some of the things with which I was
associated: the Clean Air'Act Reauthorization, Wetlands Reform, Resource
Conservation Recovery Act testimony, Superfund testimony. Those are very
difficult issues and I thought the Senate Environment Committee, the Senate
• Foreign Relations Committee, and then appearances before the Senate Finance
Committee and.the Senate Labor Committee on the North American Free Trade
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Agreement—though there were rocky moments—by and large were congenial,
respectful, and productive.
My relationships with the House were very good with the Waxman
subcommittee, although obviously I was in the position very often of defending
the Competitiveness Council or other things they despised. We had a professional
relationship. I had a good working relationship with Henry Waxman and with the
ranking Republican Norm Lent that survived a particularly difficult Clean Air
hearing where they tried to position our Clean Air Act as unaggressive. I had a
good relationship with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and with Ways and
Means, which I testified before on the North American Free Trade Agreement,
and other House committees.
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President Bush at EPA to swear in William Reilly as Administrator
There was a great deal of tension in my relationship with Chairman
Dingell that really dated almost from the beginning. I came from a sector, the
organized environmental community, that he detested. I also had associates like
Bill Rosenberg with whom he had a history, and not a good one. He simply didn't
like the kind of environmental priority my appointment represented nor did he
find the Clean Air Act, as we submitted it, a good bill. In the Waxman
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subcommittee of his committee it was pushed even farther in directions he didn't
like and I think he considered we didn't help him enough in holding the line
against some of the things he cared about, to protect the auto industry and
manufacturing sector. We had different roles and I was probably less attentive
and artful than some of my predecessors in managing the personal relationship
with him—though I did try a number of times. He thought that I tilted towards
the Senate on the Clean Air Act and I think I probably did because they returned
my phone calls and didn't regularly go around me to the White House. I had
conversations with Senator Chafee and Senator Mitchell and Senator Baucus
throughout the deliberations, as I did with Congressman Waxman. But Mr.
Dingell and I, and his staff, were less frequently in communication. He tended to
call the White House when he had a problem with us on the Clean Air Act or with
me. I didn't react well to that, either. I though!: ultimately, looking at the Clean
Air Act we got, that relationship worked satisfactorily for me, but it certainly left
some scars. ;
You don't serve in a position like mine where you're not just custodial,
where you're not just reactive, without making waves and without causing people
to become angry from time to time. That's the nature of the job. There is very
little that an EPA Administrator does that confers an unqualified good on
somebody, at least of an immediate, perceptible sort. A decision to have a new
NOX standard for automobiles obviously will help the public good, will improve
the Chesapeake Bay as we get NOX deposition down, and improve our
environment all around. But the immediate recipient of the problem and the
entity that bears the cost is the auto industry, which is not going to look very
favorably on that. That's true of virtually every decision. The EPA Administrator
doesn't go around handing out funds for housing projects or developments or
enhancing.a national park or paying for airports or roads or clinics. We just have
to accept that and hope that in spite of the contention and costs that are" associated
with EPA's decisions, the public'at least trusts both the laws and the integrity of
the people who administer them to'take the right things into account. That is one
reason I gave so much attention to communicating about what we were doing. I
thought'that was a real need, particularly coming on the heels of the Reagan
Administration, which had a rocky start on the environment. I think it's true for
any Administrator that sometimes one is tempted in Washington to spend a good
deal of time in Congress. That, in my view, for the head of an agency, unless
there is an immediate legislative issue pending, can be a mistake, can be a
distraction. It's a very large country and the Congress is important, but the rest of
the country needs attention too. This anxiety that Americans have about insiders,
I think, is exacerbated by agency heads who don't get out and around the country
to communicate, to pick up things that you only get when you see things first
hand.
Once we had gotten the Clean Air Act through, frankly, my relationship
with Congress was one of holding the line. We had no other major legislative
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objectives I'm sorry to say, that we were able to further in the latter two years of
"Sstration. "if things had been different and we'd had a ^<^£r
Act proposal, then we would have been spending more time on the H, 1, but: the
opportunities were not there, at least from 1990 on, after signing the Clean Air
Act. And, I think some in Congress felt neglected. They d been ^appo.nted. I
recall when I testified-on RCRA and essentially stonewalled and said we didnt
have a legislative proposal and we thought the legislative proposal they were
considering was bad, there was a lot of disappointment. Senator Baucus said he
My would have liked to have the-same relationship on RCRA reauthonzation as
we had on Clean Air. I also noticed that when I made some specific criticisms of
his pending bill, there was more sadness than annoyance on that committee as
they thought, look what poor Bill is now having to carry up here now and
represent In fact, they were my own views, but the White House by then had so
engaged the environmental issue in a negative-seeming way it was more difficult
to communicate a position that said, "You're going too far with this law, and -to
be believed.
MR. WILLIAMS: What stalled EPA's legislative proposals?
MR REILLY: I think certainly Governor Sununu and probably the
President concluded that the Clean Air Act, which was a marvelously
comprehensive and ambitious bill with a great deal of innovation, hadn t worked
P° ltlCS During the 18 months that bill was pending, we heard regularly how
pusillanimous it was and how inconsequential it was and reactionary it was—all
caricature, in fact, of the bill we forwarded to the Congress. As we costed it out,
the bill would cost something between $ 17 billion and $22 billion per year when
fully mature in terms of new added cost to the economy. The bill that was
reported out by the Senate Environment Committee, we costed at $42 billion to
$44 billion per year, and therefore we saw the need, as Senator Mitchell
understood, to pare down that bill, to put it in the realm that we could support and
' justify for the health and other benefits we would get from it. We did succeed, we
got it down to—I think it probably costed out at about $24 billion as it was finally
passed That's a big ticket. That, itself, is a measure of seriousness. Our bill, as
we had proposed it, wasn't far from those costs. But during the long period when
we were in negotiations to scale back the cost of the Senate Committee bill, we
were criticized and positioned as naysayers.
Finally when the bill was enacted and signed, Mr. Waxman said, This
bill is owing to the two Georges, George Bush and George Mitchell"—a generous
thing for Henry Waxman to say, and it was the truth. Yet neither he nor anyone
else on that side had said anything positive about the President's contribution for
the better part of a year and a half. So, that was credit that was too late in coming
I think the White House decided environmentalists were not going to work with
46
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1 '"":': '..: :... 4;
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us, were not willing to give credit to us as they might have to a Democratic
administration for an initiative of that magnitude, and we wouldn't do that again.
•Certainly there was a sense, too, that those costs were very significant.
We just got the bill signed when the economy began to show some of the first
signs of distress. Dick Darman related those economic problems to the Clean Air
Act. He never lost an opportunity to disparage it, to say the only possible
conceivable reason for having done it was to gain a political advantage, but, in
fact, it had not done even that. The failure of the Clean Air Act to work
politically for us weakened my position in advocating new environmental
initiatives. It reinforced the arguments of those who disdained environmental
initiatives as likely to alienate traditional Republican interests without winning
any new support from activist environmentalists.
So, from a political point of view, I think that the environment could
have worked better for us if we'd had a more forthright response on the part of
those who set the tone for the environmental debate, to a large degree the
organized environmentalists, but also the press. In fact, Lee Atwatertold me after
I had been in office less than a year,.t^at the country regarded us -and1 the President
as very serious about the environment. As he put it, "Our polls show that the
country considers Bush an environmentalist, but he ain't nuts." Well, that's
exactly where George Bush wanted to be.
So, we were succeeding in the longer term and, I think, had we been
more careful with the rhetoric, had we not engaged in the fights on the specific,
and many of them relatively trivial, regulatory issues, like the minor permit
amendments, and then had we not had the big public wetlands fight, and had we
positioned ourselves as leaders and not become isolated at the Rio Conference, we
could have come into the 1992 elections as serious, responsible people who really
had done a good job of integrating economic and environmental priorities. We
could have achieved that reputation in spite of the activists' brickbats. But too
many of the people around the President were only too ready to abandon the
environmental standard and were reenforced by environmental groups' criticism.
MR, WILLIAMS: What role did OMB and the Council on
Competitiveness play in EPA's life during that time?
MR. REILLY: In the era prior to my arrival at EPA, OMB was a thorn
in the side of EPA for its constant involvement in regulatory decisions. [David ]
Stockman, when he was Director of OMB, made it a matter of great personal
interest to engage specific regulatory choices and argue against EPA proposals.
Dick Darman did not really intrude much on our regulation-setting, unless some
issue happened to get to the Competitiveness Council, where he could be counted
on to weigh in. So, we didn't have that kind of high-level conflict. By and large,
.1 thought we were able to work through many, if not most, of our regulations with
the OMB process reasonably well. That was not true of a relatively small number
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which got a large amount of public attention, I think, as much for the way the
issue was framed and dealt with by OMB as for their substantive view.
It is profoundly frustrating to an EPA Administrator to go through all of
the careful control processes of arriving at a regulatory decision or proposal and
to respect all of the rules against ex parte contact—make sure any contact with the
reflated community is recorded, noted, memorialized, public, on the
record-and then to have it go to the White House and see many of the same
parties engaged in influencing other people who have influence over such
decisions without any public record, without any acknowledgment that this is
going on The secrecy that characterized that process, I think, is a source of great
mistrust and, potentially, of corruption. Corruption in the sense that it violates
process, not that it involves anyone taking any money.
The Competitiveness Council was layered onto the so-called Office ot
Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) review when the President became
distressed about articles in the Wall Street Journal and other places indicating he
was reregulating society'and repudiating the Reagan era reforms—-the
deregulatory priority which he, himself, in the Reagan era had championed as
head of a regulatory review task force. He had espoused the Clean Air Act and
also the Americans with Disabilities Act, so it shouldn't have been a surprise that
there was a spate of new regulations to implement those laws. EPA's contribution
to regulations was, in fact, relatively small. Something like nine or ten percent of
all regulations were EPA regulations, but they tended to be some of the more
contentious regulations and to get more attention than those of other agencies.
The President gave to his Vice President, just as Reagan had given to
him, the responsibility to get a grip on this. So, Vice President Quayle, w.shmg to
carry out his assigned task, engaged some of these questions. I thought, myselr,
the way they were engaged, while it was guaranteed to attract attention for the
Administration's deregulatory concerns, was not the most constructive way to vet
an issue. The Council's selection of issues to make a stand on, also, I thought,
wasn't the best. The Minor Permit Amendments issue was essentially a legal
issue—when a pollution source wished to increase its emissions by up to 10 tons
beyond the maximum allowed in its permit, did that trigger a requirement for a
full public review with a hearing or not? Had there been an interest in the
Competitiveness Council in avoiding a train wreck on that issue, we would have
been able to do it by an early referral to the Attorney General. I don't think there
was that interest.
I had a memorandum from my General Counsel basically boxing me in,
saying that the approach that the Competitiveness Council wanted was not a
lawful approach. Well/once I had that, I didn't have a lot of flexibility. Finally,
after months and months of wrangling, and public wrangling at that,
Congressional hearings and the rest, the President made a policy call and resolved
that as a policy matter, lie considered that the Competitiveness Council was
correct i e that no hearing was necessary. The Chief of Staff and others in the
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"White House thought that should be the end of it, and didn't fully grasp that
lawfully, legally, I had the statutory authority and the President didn't. I recall
explaining to Chief of Staff Sam Skinner that I would respect the President's view
on the policy, provided that I could be authoritatively assured that such an
approach was lawful. Absent an opinion from the Attorney General, I said I
would decline to sign a regulation waiving a hearing requirement. The White
House got an opinion from the Attorney General fairly quickly which said that the
Competitiveness Council was right on the lav/ and my General Counsel was
wrong. That provided the basis for accommodating their view, and then, of
course, we'll only know what the truth is after it's been tested in court. The
announcement of our final position on the issue was front-page news in the New
York Times, and occasioned a lot of negative publicity, so much so that President
Bush asked his counsel, Boyden Gray, "Who put me in the middle of this?" (Gray
told him it was the Vice President's staffer, Mclntosh.)
A lot of that I thought unnecessary. There was a certain amount of
posturing, I think, to make the case to that segment of the country that was
concerned about reregulation, the Reagan Republicans, that we were taking their
concerns seriously, we were not reregulating society. The wetlands issue also
engaged developmental interests, farmers' groups, and ideological conservatives.
It was perhaps a natural for a Competitiveness Council headed by a conservative
to latch onto. We, at EPA, successfully held the line on our wetlands delineation,
despite very tense battles over. it. We repeatedly made the case that there are only
about 100 million acres of wetlands left in the country and it's inconceivable that
wetlands restrictions could be having a deleterious effect on the economy of 1.6
billion privately owned acres, as some of the critics alleged. Had that process
been on the record, had it been more open, had it been less political, had the bases
for disagreement been reduced to writing in a communicable, publishable, form, I
think we all might have come out better.
But in the end, the specific impact of the Competitiveness Council on
regulations, I think, came down to two or three, not more. One was the decision
to forego recycling as a requirement for granting permits for new municipal waste
combusters, incinerators. EPA's proposal was intended to ensure that certain
kinds of waste not go into incinerators, waste containing heavy metals, such as
batteries. A condition necessary to qualify for a permit to build an incinerator was
to be a commitment to recycle a quarter of municipal waste, and to exclude
batteries altogether from the waste stream. The proposal was opposed by cities,
and by Senate Democrats such as Senator Baucus. The cities resented what they
saw as intrusion and overreaching by EPA. Baucus considered recycling
inappropriate to pursue as a Clean Air Act matter. I thought you could make a
reasonable argument for or against the proposal. The President was in favor of
recycling; I espoused a national goal of 25 percent recycling of municipal waste;
and the objective was achievable. But in deference to the critics, and frankly to
give the Vice President a win on something, I withdrew the proposal: So, that
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became a Competitiveness Council victory, the Minor Perm^A^^^^as
great battle that we had, wetlands, which was a sort of soap
opera throughout the Administration, was a stand-off. We did sigff ^
lengthen the enforcement of our wetlands laws, put people in jail ^f*
time in history for violations of wetlands laws, and increased the number of civil
actions and fines substantially. That, no doubt, contributed to the backlash. But
we took our wetlands responsibilities seriously. They were, in my view, part of
the ecological priority we had espoused.
..fn SUm the heavy press attention to the Competitiveness Council agenda
was reassuring to an important element of the Administration's constituency,
while EPA's aggressiveness in carrying out the law honored the President s
commitment to be the environmental President.
MR WILLIAMS: How important is the press and the public to an EPA
Administrator? You mentioned before that a few negative articles coming out on
the Bush Administration in the Wall Street Journal had encouraged the President
to take a different approach on matters. Are a few negative press articles an
important-gauge to art EPA Administrator on how he or she should develop
policy? What role does that play in decision making and policy making?
MR REILLY- Ordinarily, I don't think a negative article or two makes
that much difference to a specific decision, but we all swim in the same sea. The
level of public and Congressional confidence, the degree to which the White
House begins to develop an impression that maybe somebody is off the track or .s
not serving the President well or is pursuing a different agenda does matter. It s
more a cumulative thing than anything else. ,
There is no question that the ability to communicate what you re doing,
in that it has to be mediated by the press, will have a lot of impact on how much
you can do. I felt that from the beginning and gave a very high priority to
communicating about our activity. I was also sensitive-to the fact that I came to
the Bush Administration as an outsider. I had no relationships of a political nature
with any of the key personnel. I had scarcely known the President before he
appointed me and, in that sense, lacked a constituency. My constituency had to be
Environmental groups made clear in the Clean Air Act debate that they
were not going to be a constituency, though they were generally constructive and
positive towards me and helpful. They mattered less to the Administration as time
went on and the Administration gave up on ever winning them over or cultivating
thern But the general good will of the public, the belief on the part of people,
including me Congress, that we at EPA were doing the right thing and sometimes
even beleaguered, standing up for principle, was very important to my continued
capacity to do it.
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I had the feeling that we had really succeeded to a substantial degree in
improving understanding of some of what we were doing when I, having canceled
most food uses of the pesticides known as EBDC, chose to put EBDC back into
commerce a couple of years later after we got better data about its residue level on
fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. EBDC was indisputably carcinogenic in
very high doses, and there could have been a very nasty reaction torepermitting
it. A lot of EPA staff were hunkered down preparing for the hurricane. A
decision like that had not been made before. In announcing the cancellation of 50
or so food uses of EBDC, I had said that our data was worrisome but also
incomplete, and I mentioned that there were some in the Agency who suspected
that residues detected at harvest in the field v/ould quickly evanesce, as fruits and
vegetables were handled, time passed, and they were moved from the field to the
dinner plate. If that proved true, I had said, I would go where the data went.
Well, I did do that. Better data was developed through an elaborate
survey and I accepted it and reversed my position, thereby allowing the food uses.
The press reaction was largely accepting and trusting, though reporters asked hard
questions at the press conference and there were some environmentalists'
criticisms. On the whole, given the precedent I was setting and the nature of
sensitivity for something that was, after all, in very high quantities, a carcinogen,
the reaction suggested a growth in-maturity of understanding about scientific
information and about the concept of negligible risk. I thought that reaction was a
measure of the degree to which the press had become more knowledgeable since
their experience with the Alar controversy. I think some people in the press
thought they had been had and maybe had over-reacted to Alar and had panicked
the country and harmed the apple growers unnecessarily. But that new
sophistication didn't just happen.
I spent a lot of time with the press. I had been totally forthcoming about
our risk assessments whenever I announced a regulation. I freely discussed our
data on cancer deaths associated with a toxic, or costs and benefits of a regulation,
etc. When I suspected that data would have to be subject to reconsideration, that
it was necessarily flawed because we didn't have all the information, I
acknowledged that, too. Whatever we had, I shared. The press developed a habit
of asking for that information—how many cancer deaths are associated with X, Y,
or Z pollutant; how many will you avert by this decision; how many :are you
accepting? Sometimes they would ask about the maximum exposed :individual;
cohorts that we were protecting to one in 10,000, one in 100,000, one in a million.
I saw sophistication grow on the part of the press of an area that has to be
conceded to be terribly complex.
My sense of the press is very positive. I think reporters have a very
difficult job to do. I am amazed that sometimes I'll turn on the television and see
a perfectly clear, straightforward chemical explanation of an extremely
complicated process, such as stratospheric ozone depletion or climate change. I
think the press is communicating about the environment better and better,
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although there are shortcomings and the people in the press will be the first to
admit tha they often don't have the training, whether scientific or economic and
oft" don't have the time, either. But, one thing they ought to have - enough me
on the part of people in positions like the one I had or others around himto-heP
them understand the issues, because ultimately if they don't understand them, the
country won't either.
MR WILLIAMS: // seems (hat (hepress and Congress both have done
a lot of oversight of EPA in the past. I think of Congress in terms of Superfund
issues and the contracting issue was a major blow-up during your-that s
prolMythe^ron^or^
Administration. Do you think those types of concerns-Superfund contract
management, pollution prevention, those types of issues-were adequately
addressed by EPA's various Congressional and press constituencies.
MR REILLY: Well, the contracting issue is one that I think is a
consequence of a number of things, one of which is that the priorities within the
Agency itself have always favored programmatic environmental protection
decisions. The management questions in an aggressive agency just hke in. an
environmental organization, have a habit of attracting less prestige. EPA hi* the
defects of its qualities. It is zealous, high-energy, highly committed, idealistic,
r Sffift not one of those agencies where, as you walk through the hal s, you
feel the adrenalin flowing out your shoes. There are several, I've discovered, but
EPA is not, happily, one of those.
But it also is fair to say that there is the tendency, and has been
historically, of some in the Agency to behave like environmental cowboys, ready
to ride off to round up the latest errant steer identified by the press or the
Congress, not, incidentally, enjoying the budgetary reward that may come with
that momentarily. The responsibility to manage day-to-day mundane .activities
like contracts, even in an agency where a substantial amount of work is done by
outsiders because Congress doesn't give enough money to the Agency to do it
otherwise, gets neglected. I think that has been a problem with EPA
We gave the correction of those problems a very high priority. To keep
things in perspective, the kinds of contracts we're talking about are small beer
alongside the Defense Department and the Energy Department equipment
contracts for waste cleanup, for example. Nevertheless, they're important and
public trust has to be maintained and the dollars securely husbanded and
accounted for. .
Having said that, I think it's important also to acknowledge that those
who have a habit of pointing to EPA management problems, failure to meet
milestones, failure to get regulations out on time or complete reports according to
the statutory deadlines, or contracts management issues, often have a larger
agenda than merely pointing to that kind of problem. To the extent that the
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Agency's own conduct is discredited, it becomes more difficult for the Agency to
advocate new initiatives, stronger laws, or to advance its own agenda in reforming
policy. It becomes easier for some regulated sectors to stonewall or to overcome
the Agency by raising doubts in the mind of the public and elements of the
Congress as to whether the Agency can handle added responsibilities, whether it
can even do what it's been given the job to do.
That's all part of the game and I think the EPA leadership needs to
remember that fun's fun and when there is an honest criticism, it ought to be taken.
seriously and responded to. But protracted attention to some of these issues in a
$7-billion-per-year agency to the neglect of much larger problems in other
agencies tells you something. It's part of a lightning that is falling on an agency
that is doing its job and doing it vigorously. EPA is an Agency that is doing its
job very vigorously. No other Federal agency in recent history, excepting NASA
in the latter '60s, has succeeded so spectacularly in achieving the goals set for it.
MR. WILLIAMS: During your tenure, you saw radical, global political
changes. What impacts do you think those global political changes had on EPA ?
MR. REILLY: With the waning of the Cold War, the global political
situation changed fundamentally while I was at: EPA. In my view, it accelerated a
process that was already underway of opening up a whole new world to the
Agency—a world that desperately needed the experience of EPA, which is
preeminent in its field internationally, a world that needed help in setting
priorities, in gaining a sense of direction, that needed also, frankly, to learn from
American mistakes, particularly since many of the societies most in need of help
don't have the resources that the United States has.
We tried to respond to that by making the Agency available to Eastern
European countries, and former Soviet countries. We set up the Budapest Center,
which was an EPA proposal that I made to the Cabinet and the President before he
went to Hungary—later known as the Bush Center. We worked with the World
Bank, I made the rounds, to a degree, in fact, that I doubt any of my predecessors
ever have, to the Inter-American Development Bank to try to foster debt-for-
nature deals with Latin America, to a meeting with the President of Mexico on
Debt for Nature, and to Brazil to meet with their Cabinet on a number, of issues,
particularly leading up to the Rio Conference. We had a very active international
agenda and the President made clear that he thought environment, as a matter of
foreign policy, was important, that we should attend to those issues. Secretary
Baker was always friendly toward our being involved as well. There was a sense,
I think—certainly Thad it—of much heightened environmental possibility as a
result of the waning of the Cold War, the freeing up of resources, the relief of
tensions and anxieties, the ability finally to communicate honestly with our
Russian counterparts, with whom we had had a bilateral agreement for 20 years
but who had nevertheless withheld a lot of information. We made a real start
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toward exploiting that opportunity. In the process, we secured for the Agency a
role that it had not had before. We had the President's support in this, and we
experienced occasional tensions with the State Department—not unmanageable
ones, but tensions nevertheless.
I hoped very much that in my time I would be able to institutionalize a
high level of international activity and priority within the Agency by creating for
the first time a Senate-confirmed Assistant Administrator for International
Activities. I strengthened that staff, and moved its complement towards 100 staff
members. I created environmental attaches in Paris at OECD and in Mexico with
our embassy there, and we had plans to have attaches in Moscow and Tokyo, and
I would have liked to have one each in China and perhaps Taiwan and South
Korea and maybe Thailand. These latter are doing a great deal of environmental
investing, and locating our people there could have served more than an
environmental purpose, it could also have furthered the export of U.S.
technologies in the area of pollution control in a time when billions are being
spent by those countries.
:. .tye played a role in the development of the Enterprise for the Americas
Program. The Debt for Nature concept was our idea. For each of the G-7
summits, of leaders of the seven major industrial nations, I briefed the President
and Secretary of State on the environment. The President took me to his first G7
Summit in Paris—an unprecedented decision by him to have an environmental
Minister with him, which no other head of government had ever done or has done
since. All of this elevated our role, our profile. As I watch now the degree to
which international environmental responsibilities have shifted to the State
Department, I'm concerned that things that only EPA can do effectively, will not
be done. The role of an EPA Administrator in dealing with environmental
problems along the border, for example, cannot be assumed by a Commerce
Secretary or even an Undersecretary of State. Should the question arise: "Are we
adequately protected against cholera outbreaks?" or "What's causing these brain
stem disorders at birth of some of these border children?", you're not going to
have a Commerce Secretary or an Undersecretary of State taken seriously on
those issues, no matter how good they are. That is something that EPA has the
authority and competence to address and the country will want to hear from the
EPA Administrator. It makes sense that EPA be in the driver's seat on'the border
plan, therefore. That's true of many other issues as well.
I think frankly that it would be healthy, and it's very healthy for the
Agency itself, to encounter environmental problems in other countries because it
lends a sense of perspective to our own problems and allows EPA professionals^to
recharge their batteries and to become ire invigorated and to recognize what they're
dqing, they're doing for the whole world. It's a noble enterprise and there's
nothing that brings that home to people more memorably than to help another
country figure out what to do about its waste problem, which is an order of
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magnitude greater than ours, or its air pollution problem which is actually killing
people and causing lung disorders in front of you.
Another advantage it has, frankly, for an EPA Administrator, or at least
had to the two Presidents whose Administrations I served, Nixon and Bush, is that
it gives you something to talk to the President about. Now, there are those who
say that Bill Clinton is different and maybe he is, but my experience is that you
don't talk for too long about sewers or the Clean Air Act or Superfund and hold a
President's interest. But, if you've just come back from a meeting with Mrs.
Thatcher or you've had a long conversation with Helmut Kohl and you
communicate that in a memorandum, you're likely to get invited over for a
meeting or maybe even for lunch with the President and show up on the
President's calendar. This being the city that it is, that is noticed and that will
fortify you in other difficult battles with other agencies as your relationship with
the President is respected. That may sound a somewhat narrow arid self-serving
kind of interest, but, in fact, it's part of the way the game is played and I think it
will ever be so.
Finally, we now understand that many of the most important decisions
affecting the future of America's environment will be made in Beijing, Delhi and
Brasilia: Those countries' decisions regarding energy policy, or manufacture of
ozone-depleting chemicals, or forest practices, we will want to influence. An
internationally active and helpful and sophisticated EPA can do that.
[Novembers, 1993]
MR. WILLIAMS: We're down to talking about industry. Wtiat goals
did you want to achieve in dealing with industry? .How did you balance the need
to get industry's support and cooperation with the need to enforce the taws? And
generally, how would you characterize EPA's relationship with industry during
your tenure? , '
MR. REILLY: I had the sense going into EPA that the relationship with
industry had been episodic and at times less productive than it could have been. It
seemed to me that the better, more sophisticated industry leaders understood that
the nation's environmental commitments were here to stay, that the support for the
environment had stayed high in the polls, that even through the recessions of the
70s and early '80s there had been no roll-back in air and water law. Moreover, I
thought that business leaders' calls for less bureaucracy, more efficiency in
permitting, more predictability in administration of environmental laws on the.
part of EPA, were reasonable.
I immediately found myself, in dealing with the Alar controversy, faced
with the asymmetry between the chemical industry—the manufacturer of
Alar—and the agricultural industry—the fanners and growers of apples who were
people really hurt by that scare. I tried to get voluntary cooperation, finally
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' t"
succeeded,'from the manufacturer, though EPA didn't have sufficient statutory
authority to compel it.
I think my next encounter with industry was over the Exxon Valdez issue
where we dealt with Exxon, which substantively did very well, in my view, in
responding to the cleanup, once you got beyond recognizing that, inexcusably, no
one was prepared for it. In public relations terms, however, I think Exxon lost the
war. Their Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was so aggressive and conveyed such
an odd sense of victimization on television and publicly that it set the company
back more than it migfit have.
I did learn from those experiences and tried to be careful, particularly in
crafting the Clean Air Act, to consult with industry and did so with the oil, auto,
and chemical industries particularly. Those relationships had their ups and
downs. I think the chemical industry relationships were largely quite good in my
tenure at EPA. I viewed them as having become quite progressive. Even some of
the companies that had been laggards in the '70s, like Dow, became leaders in the
late '80s and early '90s. I dealt extensively with Dupont on the elimination of.
chlorofluorocarbons, of which they were the largest manufacturer.
I had good relations with some of the oil company leaders. In fact, I
supported development of a project to review the Amoco refinery at Yorktown to
test the long-standing arguments of engineers that more environmental quality
could be achieved by paying less attention to specific emissions and effluents and
more attention to total plant impact on the environment. The project proved that
hypothesis correct. That project had some rocky moments. EPA's Philadelphia
enforcement people, with exquisitely poor timing, went after Amoco and slapped
a big fine on their Yorktown refinery. I had to recuse myself from anything
affecting the decisions on enforcement and call up Amoco CEO Larry Fuller and
ask him to keep Amoco engaged. That was not easy to do, the $500,000 fine
enraged Amoco people as bad faith, but Fuller responded to me and we kept the
project on track.
I can recall dealing with various of the industry groups, which I made a
point of talking to regularly right from the beginning. I had them in along with
everybody else. I talked to trade associations, talked to the electric power people
about the acid rain provisions of the Clean Air Act, which were very upsetting to
them. I dealt, of course, throughout my term, with the coalition that industry had
put together on climate issues. I think, given the nature of the history and the
inherent adversarial character of a regulator dealing with regulated entities, we
had a reasonably good relationship.
I suppose the auto industry'probably would not consider that I was as
responsive to some of their concerns as I might have been. The industry, I
thought, in various ways failed to perceive and act on its own interests. It left too
much to its Congressional spokespeople in Washington. But, by and large, I think
the C'lea'.n.'.Air Act worked well for the auto industry. It was the first such Act that
had ever focused on fuels and that asked as much of the fuel suppliers and
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manufacturers as it did of the automobile engine makers. The auto manufacturers
should appreciate that our new emphasis-on fuels was an acknowledgement that
they had already cleaned up their cars to the .point where new 1990 cars were
about 96 percent cleaner than they had been 20 years ago. With our Clean Air
Act, we moved that another 2 percentage points up but looked to changes in the
composition of fuels to achieve additional pollution reductions.
Pulp and paper, which had a bad enforcement history, was very
constructive, in my view, in dealing with the dioxin issue in terms of researching
the question jointly with EPA, and in terms of getting dioxin releases way, way
down, about 90 percent in our time.
I believed very strongly that because of the leadership that was in
industry and the sense that .environment was a concern and real commitment, an
snduring concern of the American people, that we could craft a different kind of
program in response to that. It would draw out the energies and creativity of
industry to help solve problems, rather than just simply have them fight us. And
so, I proposed the Volunteer Programs, 33/50 to reduce toxic emissions—17
:oxics by 33 percent by 1992 and 50 percent by '95. The response to that was
enthusiastic. Companies chose the means and achieved the first goal a year early,
eliminating 33 percent of these critical toxics by 1991. I'm sure they will do
setter than 50 percent by 1995. Companies routinely took credit for that in their
Annual Reports, they wrote me letters proudly touting their achievements, they
;mphasized them with their workers and stockholders and others. In every way,
he participating companies demonstrated a capacity to go beyond the law. That
s admirable.
In the process, they learned some things technologically, which helped
hem save money, make money, reduce pollution, and allowed EPA, then, to
inderstand more about possibilities of solving problems cooperatively. In fact, a
lot very widely understood purpose of the 33/50 program was to educate the EPA
vorkforce that at the same time and without compromising either your regulatory
esponsibilities or your enforcement responsibilities, you can work cooperatively
vith people who, most of them, have the same objectives you do. And you can
earn from them. Incidentally, no conceivable regulation would have allowed me
o obtain elimination of a third of the worst toxic, emissions—400 million
>ounds—in little more than a year. '.
The other programs, the Energy Star Computers Program, which awards
ecognition to computer companies which reduce by about 50 percent their energy
leeds; Environmental Leadership Program; Design for Leadership Program,
vhich builds on 33/50 to craft a new relationship with companies that have
lemonstrated they deserve it, also saving on oversight on the part of EPA; the
3reen Lights Program that gets commitments to reduce energy use very
ubstantially without any loss in quality using new lighting technologies; the Safer
'esticides Initiative that puts applications for non-toxic pesticides at the front of
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:, ! I .,
the line for registration—all of those were part really of a new generation of
environmental policies and, I think, a new direction that the country badly needed.
The United States has a distinctly adversarial concept of environmental
protection. It is, in my view, excessively adversarial. It has been wasteful of time
and money. We have it in everything from rule makings to cleanup. I wanted to
change that and I hope that I laid the foundation to do that. The regulatory
negotiations proved very popular, the ones that we did with industry, and that
represents a new mode of determining what a regulation should be. We did one
on fuels and we did one on ethanol—unfortunately had to repudiate that in the
heat of the 1992 electoral season. Those negotiations were constructive and were
welcomed by all the parties with one possible exception, the Office of
Management and Budget, which has never liked them. It's unfortunate that that is
true, but OMB believed, and probably still believes, that a regulatory negotiation,
to the extent that it unites all of the participants around a single regulation, dilutes
the single OMB representative and prevents OMB from having another bite of the
apple, which it likes to have when it reviews regulations. I think that is very
short-sighted and turf-conscious, but it happens to be the OMB attitude toward
consensual regulatory development.
I think regulatory negotiations are extremely productive at getting a
result that works for everybody-where people don't hold back their best ideas so
they can litigate them later; where you have.a regulation promulgated that will, in
fact, be the regulation, is not contested or litigated, permitting the regulated sector
to invest on the basis of it. We don't typically get that. Four out of five
regulations signed by an EPA Administrator are contested in court; regulatory
negotiations are not. That points to a different kind of relationship. It points to
the kind that we need and the kind that I think we demonstrated is possible. So, I
feel quite good about the relationship finally that we built with industry. I simply
hope that it endures.
MR. WILLIAMS: William Rtickelshaus, in a recent oral history
interview, mentioned that sometimes state and local governments saw EPA as a
gorilla in the closet that helped them regulate industry within their constituencies
or within their areas. But sometimes they found that EPA was a gorilla that leapt
outof the closet and beat them on the head, as well, for their pollution
problems—a case in point being a couple of enforcement actions that Ruckelshaus
took early in 1970 against various big cities for municipal waste pollution into
various rivers. What would you say your Administration did to address the
legitimate concerns of state and local governments and how would you
characterize that relationship, generally?
• - ' • ••' •" • '•• .•-.' ••'••> i ;i '•• ' ' ' i • •'
MR. REILLY: We gave a high priority to decentralizing a lot of our
activity. EPA was, frankly, more decentralized than I realized it would be when I
arrived at the Agency, but that is a response to the complexity of the country and
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16 nature of environmental problems, which differ one place from another. We
insulted very closely with the Governors, with the Western Governors'
ssociation, with whom I met at least twice, with the National Governors'
ssociation with whom I met regularly, and saw them as partners in the
iterprise. I particularly valued their contribution at the beginning of the
atutory consideration in the Congress, for example, of the amendments to the
afe Drinking Water Act on which the Governors had very strong views. I
member saying to the Governors, "Don't wait until we come down with onerous
gulations, which are the consequences of the statute we must administer, to
jmplain about it. Work with EPA when we're trying to head it off, in hearings.
hat was less successful than I would have liked. Governors, like the rest of us,
tok at what's on the front burner and the problems they have at hand. :
I think one of the most important contributions, though, that we! made to
ate and local relationships was to do a review of all the many requirements that
'feet localities and put them in a single large book, which is a very thick book.
lien we recognized that the local officials, especially of small cities and towns,
ho must administer these requirements and who often suffer great liabilities as a
msequence, who have to sign off on hazardous wastes as being properly handled
id monitored, for example, are quite frequently unpaid. Sometimes they're
achers, plumbers, electricians, working part time. One has to ask, "Why should
ey do this?" Why should they take responsibility for leaking underground
orage tanks, which are complex and technical and can open them to liability?
ave we got the right way of interfacing with them? Have we made services and
chnical advice available to them of the sort that they need?
Municipal liability for Superfund sites threatened to bankrupt
)vernments in New England, California and other areas.' I tried to promulgate a
ip, a maximum percentage of cleanup costs beyond which municipalities would
>t be liable. The White House blocked that initiative. I recall Senator Rudman
ying to me once, and it made quite an impression, "I don't care what the law
ys, I used to be a Federal judge and no Federal judge is going to order Durham,
sw Hampshire, for example, to spend more on a Superfund site than it spends on
school system." I guess I would add to that, nor should it. I think some of these
ings have to be kept in perspective.
So, we did attend to the states' concerns and needs. We tried to reduce
e number of standards that we were promulgating under the Safe Drinking
ater Act every three years. I'm very pleased to siee my successor has continued
at direction. We tried to reduce the number of tests that they must conduct,
irticularly for things that aren't used in their states. I recall Carol Browser, then
orida Environment Secretary, saying that Under the Safe Drinking Water Act
1,000 drinking water tests were required in Florida in one year. We tried to
Dognize that there is more on the plate of states and localities than they can
issibly manage. To the extent that we put it there as duplication of an effort,
s'll take it off. Our.total quality management efforts were intended to relieve
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states of a lot of second guessing and oversight and unnecessary duplication. The
effort in my view, did not go fir enough on my watch. I think it should continue
and given the very sorry plight of some of the states' fiscal situations, such as
California, New York, and others, and all the other burdens they bear, there's
really no excuse for doing things twice. •
I remember, in thinking about state relationships, having a very difficult
time with our'Chicago office when they attempted to deny a permit for a golf
course in Michigan that would have altered the environment of an undeveloped
area that probably we all might prefer to see remain pristine. Essentially, denial
of a perrmt to develop a small amount of wetlands, to a developer who was
prepared to restore significantly more wetlands in return, was asking the wetlands
program to bear a large burden. Michigan was the only state that had received
delegated authority under the 404 Wetlands Program to make such decisions, and
in my view that entailed authority to make such decisions free of second-guessing
by EPA. EPA should not second-guess each permit decision in such a situation,
but rather should annually review the state's administration of the program as a
whole. The Agency wasn't doing that. It was essentially behaving towards
Michigan the way it behaved towards every other state, that is, to monitor and
review every single permit and overturn, overfile on those that it disagreed with.
finally withdrew wetlands regulatory authority from the region for the oversight
of states that had delegated programs. I was hearing from Florida and other state,
that had considered applying for delegation that the Michigan case proved that
you get nothing for it, so why take it, what's it gotten Michigan?
The opposite argument to that is that the threat, at least, of intervening
with respect to a specific permit, will keep the game honest, will keep the state
with a believable sanction in the event it gets under strong political pressure to
grant a permit, will allow the state to say, "EPA will never permit it. They'll com
in and disallow it." Whereas, the sanction of, "EPA will remove program
administration authority from us" is less plausible, certainly more remote from ar
individual decision. I recognize that reality, but tend to think, given the resource:
we have, more deference to state decision making is appropriate. I believe that is
a consequence both of the way we crafted our Federal system and also of the
increasing sophistication and technical ability of states.
I think my view of that is probably not the majority one at EPA, which
has a habit of second-guessing to a considerable degree. There are some statutes
like the Clean Air Act that really contemplate that approach. But, where that is
not the model that's in the law, I would opt for a greater degree of deference to
state decision making. I think the governors understood that, some of them
respected that, and our relationship was, therefore, pretty good.
My relationship with the mayors and the county officials was quite gooc
when I made the promise to reduce their liabilities or cap them under Superfund.
But, when I couldn't deliver on it, I'm not sure how I ended up with them. I did,
myself, in conjunction with the Attorney General, bring lawsuits against 60-odd
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mnicipalit'ies for failure to enforce pre-treatment requirements for water toxics
nder the Clean Water Act. That strained our relationship, certainly, with those
ities, some of them like Detroit, which were big. It was, however, a critical area
f water quality enforcement. The absence of pretreatment means the whole
/stem breaks down because waste water treatment plants can't handle toxics. It
; in the tradition of EPA's vigorous enforcement Consistent with the
nforcement record we had, which set records for criminal and civil actions—in
ict, involved more of both than had characterized the previous 18-year Jiistory of
le Agency, I think our relationships both with industry and with states and
)calities ended up pretty sound.
MR. WILLIAMS: What about tribal governments?
MR. REILLY: I am very proud of what we did with tribal governments.
took very seriously the law's treatment of tribes as states and proceeded to
elegate real authority to them when we judged*they had the technical capacity to
>cercise it. Not all tribes do. Some do, more are getting it. I particularly was
roud of delegating water quality authority to the Pueblos of New Mexico, a
roup of 12 or 13, which I visited, which clearly had the requisite expertise and
apability and were threatening to impose some fairly large costs on Albuquerque
y requiring much better water pollution control on waters that then flowed
irough tribal lands. I can recall a visit to a newspaper in Albuquerque where I
-as questioned quite strenuously on this point and simply said that the tribes,
tider the law, were entitled to this authority. They had been getting water
slivered by Albuquerque that was unacceptable and they ought to exercise their
ower to get Albuquerque to shape up. But I said that they were not stupid and
icy were not, obviously, going to shut down a city of 250,000 or make it spend a
illion dollars on water quality cleanup. I thought the Indians would behave
isponsibly, but that Albuquerque had better take them seriously. That was my
bjective and I think that's pretty much the way it turned out/
The tribes have a huge amount of land in the United States. I was
artled to discover how much land they have. There has been a tendency for
aste to go their way and for some of them to accept waste in return for
Dntributions to their needs. I think, to be consistent, we have to respect,Indians'
ghts to make those decisions and if they wish to have a solid waste landfill on
leir property, provided they have the capacity to make a judgement about it and
lonitor it and control it and oversee it, that's their prerogative. Not everybody
>rees with that, but you can't have it both ways. You can't both defer to their
jthority and their expertise and legal power that they exercise provided they
icet a certain standard and say, not so fast, when they want to use it to
;commodate a waste facility. I remember getting an award from the tribal
roups and I thought we advanced the ball in recognizing the growing maturity
id responsibility of tribes in the United States.
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MR. WILLIAMS: You spoke on occasion about starting a national
debate on the environment. What exactly did you mean by that and how
successful do you believe EPA was at doing that?
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MR REILLY: I saw my role at EPA as involving a large amount of
education 1 believed that the environment was hot a widely understood area of
public policy. There was a tendency to present it in primitive ways that seemed 1
me no longer conformed to the realities. The characterizations so often in the
press are of white hats and black hats, that's the only way to make the issues com
alive and be interesting. This approach neglects the critical contribution of
science in helping us understand the naulre of threats, risks, of the proportion of
problems, some of which are more serious and enduring than others. It also ^
neglects the economics, which is important not because some things you won t d«
because they cost a lot of money, but because when you do them, you wil have 1
realize that there are other things that you cannot do. Money is limited. Those
kinds of disciplines have never been acknowledged in the national debate about
the environment. .
So, we had two major reports that we conducted. One was the Science
Advisory Board Report that resulted in the document Reducing Risk that
characterized the threats to the environment, ranked them, and then evaluated
EPA's programs in response to them. It concluded that while EPA's money was
largely going for oil spills and hazardous waste, major threats to the environment
were in the nature of climate change, species losses, forest fragmentation, ozone
depletion, indoor air pollution, pesticide risk to the applicators of the chemicals.
thought that was an extremely important debate. I did everything I could to
publicize that debate. I asked Senator Moynihan to hold a hearing on it; he did.
We got states to conduct their own priority reviews of comparative risks—those
are going forward in half the states right now. And I think that is very important
The other major report we did was the "Cost of Clean," which is require
by statute, and that requires EPA to look at public and private outlays on the
environment and try to put a number next to them, try to figure out what they are
We did that and concluded that about two percent of the gross national product
Was. being allocated to air, water, and waste control—leaving aside parks, forest,
and wildlife. We also did something else that had never been done before with
such a report. We projected out to the end of the decade where that number
would go, and concluded that it would reach about three percent of GNP, largely
as a consequence of the costs entailed in hazardous waste clean up and
particularly Federal facility clean up. I thought that an important thing to do
because it did put in perspective U.S. efforts relative to those of our major
competitor nations, very few of whom are spending anything close to what the
United States is spending.
I tried to use both science and economics to frame issues, for example,
about the future of Superfund or the new directions in the Resource Conservatior
62. , , ;.
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-------
Recovery Act, making the point that so many of the proposals made, and under
consideration in the Congress, would, in fact, cause these outlays to be even
higher, even though experts do not consider that hazardous waste represents that
significant a threat to the health or environment of the American people. It had,
in fact, been overestimated as a problem. I think that growing environmental
literacy among the press and in the Congress is very important to the future of
environmental policy. The degree to which EPA is sensitive to science and
economics will make the important things that we do more enduring, will give
:hem greater credibility over the long term with the public at large. The
snvironmental cowboy ethic, which is a part of EPA and is part of our history and
jur lore and is fun, is just not enough to give the country the kind of
environmental policy it's going to have to have if these outlays are to be
maintained and if the significant problems are really going to be addressed.
I think that there was more understanding of the priority question, of the
comparative risk way of thinking, in the Congress and in the press, certainly,
when I left than when I had arrived. So frequently one hears in the Congress now,
"How big a problem is this relative to other problems? How much money are we
spending on it versus some of the other big problems that we may be spending
less on? Is it worth it in proportion?" Those are absolutely the right questions to
ask and I think we encouraged people to ask them that way.
MR. WILLIAMS: Why didn't environmental groups give you, one of
their own, the support that you might have expected? :
MR. REILLY: Environmental'groups behaved towards me personally in
a fairly generous way, a positive way. I was always conscious of the distinction
many of them made between me and the White House or me and the
Administration.
There were times when I regretted that I couldn't bring more support to
the President when he was doing things they really should have liked. I
particularly was disappointed at the reception to our Clean Air Act proposal by
the Clean Air Coalition. Most members of that coalition acknowledged that
Bush's was a very progressive bill, they had not expected a bill aimed at
sliminating ten million tons of sulfur dioxides in the acid rain title, for example,
sven though that's what they had advocated, and that's what they got. They,
nevertheless, for tactical reasons, in order to move the bill further in their
direction on ozone reduction, chose to characterize the Administration bill as
weak. For the better part of 18 months, the environmentalists' caricature set the
terms of the debate. When the bill came out of the Senate Environment
Committee, it was going to impose an annual burden on the economy, according
:o EPA and OMB calculations, of about $42 billion to $44 billion when it matured
ifter 1999. That was unreasonable, so we spent some months negotiating with
Senator Mitchell, Senator Baucus, and others to pare that back and did finally,
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with the great help, particularly, of Senator Mitchell. We got the annual, end-state
annual costs down to about $22 billion to $24 billion, no small amount. I
remember the League of Conservation Voters scored all the key votes trimming
. the expense of the bill and they penalized Senator Chafee, Senator Baucus,
Senator Mitchell and other people who worked things out with us. The Senators,
who negotiated cost reductions not only important to the Administration but also
vitally necessary to ensure enactment by the full Senate, saw their environmental
ratings plummet as vote after vote on the Environment Committee's bill was
scored against them. The Senators who saw their previously outstanding
environmental ratings drop to 50 or even below included several of the Senate's
environmental champions.
That experience showed that environmentalists were out of touch. It
showed that they had allowed their ideology to run away with them. Also, the
habit o? negativism, of reflexive antipathy that had characterized their relationship
wim the Reagan-Bush Administration unfortunately carried over to the Bush
Administration, even though our initiatives, particularly during the first couple of
years, were strong—on legislative initiatives like clean air and food safety most
notably; in the farm bill; on budget outlays; and on important regulatory calls
such as my veto of the Two Forks Dam. But, environmental groups did not credit
or acknowledge most of those strong environmental initiatives. (They were,
however, very supportive of my Two Forks Dam decision.) The reasons for that
are complex. I think habit really explains some of it. Vice President Bush had
:. been Vgart of the Reagan Administration
continuing^
Administration. Environmentalists clearly understood that the President had made
•appointments designed to "tilt" one way at the Interior Department and another
way at EPA, and they saw very little change at Interior from the Reagan era,
although the budget for land acquisition at Interior was much higher under Bush.
• There was the body language of Chief of Staff Sununu and Budget
Director Darman, which was unfailingly skeptical about environmental initiatives
and unnecessarily provocative to environmentalists^ It pointed up an ideological
division even when there wasn't a substantive" conflict, between me and EPA and
the White House. The White House, particularly, was highly ineffective in its
public relations in dealing with the environment. It was as though they were
ambivalent about wanting credit. On the one hand they resented when the
Administration was criticized by environmentalists^ but on the other hand they
didn't want to claim too much for our environmental initiatives lest they upset the
business community and the more conservative elements of the constituency. The
White House simply never resolved how it wished to present itself on the
environment.
Finally, I think the President and his advisors decided that politically the
environmental issue was too costly and was not working for the Administration.
There was too little positive coming back for all the initiatives we were making.
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Summit of the leaders of the industrial countries in Paris in June of 1989 was
the greenest Summit ever held and we, the United States, were responsible for it
aeing green. I was the only environment Minister who was there accompanying a
head of state, and yet the environmental community used that occasion, to
:omplain that we hadn't set targets for CO2 reduction. I can still recall the sour
expression on President Bush's face when a reporter at the final press conference
in the garden behind the U.S. Ambassador's Residence questioned his saying that
the meeting had made important strides on the environment. "That's not what
environmentalists are saying," she pointed out.
The President decided, probably against his better judgment and instinct,
;o close off most of the California coast to new oil and gas development and part
3f the environmental community hit him for it-. The Sierra Club criticised Bush
because his moratorium was not permanent but only for the remaining years of
the decade.
That's the kind of stuff that we dealt with constantly. There is no doubt
in my mind that political partisanship played a role in the positions of many of the
activist organizations. In fact, a majority of the staff at most of the activist
jnvironmental groups are Democrats and the culture of these groups is
Democratic. That is true even for the more moderate ones, like World Wildlife
Fund. Many staffers from the organized environmental community, in fact, have
gone into the Clinton Administration. Activist environmentalists display great
skepticism about Republicans as the party of business and they perceive
Republicans as less prone to regulate than. Democrats. They are less willing to be
is generous or as tolerant toward a Republican Administration as they are toward
i Democratic Administration. However, I can recall that President Carter and his
Press Secretary, Jody Powell, had their conflicts with environmentalists: there is a
lewspaper headline I once showed our EPA staff—"White House to EPA, Shut
LJp or Quit." It was, in fact, from a press conference that Jody Powell had
conducted. So one doesn't want to make too much of the partisanship of
environmentalists. Elements of the Carter White House fell to calling
environmentalists "1000 percenters," people whom you could never please. But I
jiought we deserved better of the environmental community, particularly in the
first couple of years, than we got. In fact, it hurt the environment and it hurt our
:apacity to make further initiatives in the latter part of the Administration that the
•ewards had been so few in the first part.
MR. WILLIAMS: Since the 1970s, well, since the 1960s really,
zoologists, and environmentalists listening to ecologists, have looked for ways to
nake pollution control cross-media so that by cleaning one pollutant you're not
Jumping it into another medium. When you came into office, at an event
celebrating EPA's 20th anniversary, a couple of former Administrators said that
sou didn't need to reorganize the Agency along cross-media lines. They
counseled you against that and you seemed to have taken their advice. What
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,i lllFY1!"' SHil
compelled you to follow their advice? Why didn't you reorganize the Agency
along cross- media lines?
: '"" • •• • • • "! ;j •'• '". ."':';-" j; ' '• '"'';;
MR. REILLY: There are a couple of explanations for my decision not tc
reorganize the Agency, and the most important and fundamental is reorganization
involves tremendous costs in terms of time, organization, and momentum. I didn'
know how much time I had and certainly when I began to have some of the
conflicts with the White House Chief of Staff, Budget Director, later with the Via
President, I thought my tenure might be short and I didn't want to sacrifice any of
that time to reorganization.
The goals of cross-media policy that I cared about, I tried to achieve by
making them part of my ten priorities at the Agency by asking questions of our
Assistant Administrators in a cross-media way, by having joint teams on a numbe
of task forces and problem-solving exercises. I think the Agency got in the habit
of thinking of itself more as a unit, as a coherent entity concerned with the
environment as opposed to air, water, waste, or toxics. Raising the ecological
profile also had that effect because the ecology is not something that allows you
to segregate. It's the place where you see it whole. My ecological initiatives, for
the Great Lakes, national estuaries, and the geographic initiatives I championed,
these all involved a cross media perspective to administer. And we targeted
enforcement priorities on cross media problems by requiring that a significant
percentage of enforcement actions involve suits for violations of more than one
statute. When the problem posed is not this steel plant or that leaking dump, but
the restoration and protection of one of the Great Lakes, it forces you to look at
the problem whole, to ask, what is the most effective thing I can do to clean up
and protect the lake? One has to look at air, water, enforcement, toxics, voluntap
programs, and the contribution that all of them make. That's just the way I like it.
One reason I like geographic initiatives and talked about them so much is because
that's the way the world is, and certainly the way the public sees it: They don't sei
it in media compartments.
A second reason for not addressing the cross-media problem by
reorganization is that the reorganization would have to be very fundamental. I
think it finally should come, but it should come as a consequence of a statute that
integrates the various media. I had such a statute Terry Davies had drafted one
when he worked for me at The Conservation Foundation and I often discussed
with him the possibility of just putting that out forcomment, frying to raise
attention to it, focus on it, get the community at-large discussing it. He thought,
and most others thought, that this was both thankless—it would have had costs in
terms of threatening some Congressional committees—and hopeless. There was
no way, in the time we had, that the Congress was going to do anything about the
cross-media problem.
We set out to move the Agency to a cross-media perspective by the
priorities we set,.the training and education we provided our staff, and also
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through some very important and influential demonstrations we conducted. The
best known of these was the work we did with the Amoco Company at their
refinery in Yorktown, Virginia. The analysis we jointly carried out there proved
that by asking the question, "What is the best way to intervene in the process to
improve the overall environment?," a better, more cost-effective reduction of
critical pollutants can be obtained than by merely marching through the various
media making emission and effluent reductions,, So I was never persuaded that
reorganization is the best way to achieve a cross media orientation, and I'm not
sure I would counsel my successor to engage in much reorganization either.
Obviously, one can achieve these things differently. Perhaps more personnel
movement within the Agency is appropriate at this time, given that there's been a
lot of continuity for some time in some of the programs and it might be healthy to
open them up a little bit, get people into the habit of dealing with a couple of the
media. :
We did think a good deal about reorganization. Of the more modest but
still important reorganizing moves I made, I should mention that I established a
new Science Advisor in the Administrator's office and created the post; of
Scientific Advisor to each of the Assistant Administrators and the Regional
Administrators. Those, obviously, are integrating kinds of functions. But, I can
recall talking to Russell Train before I even took over at EPA who said,
reorganizations just mean huge interruptions of the forward momentunji, the
progress of an agency, and one has to have a very large reason to do that to an
agency. I'm conscious now what a terrific drain a change of Administrations is.
The hiatus that occurs as you try to get new people in place, get their names
cleared by the White House, get them investigated by the FBI, get their names up
to the Congress and get them confirmed by the Senate. To add reorganization on
that at the beginning of a term-will leave you with very little to show for your
efforts two years out.
You look at the current Administration at EPA and I'm often reminded,
by this time on our watch, six months into our term, we had dealt with the Exxon
Valdez oil.spill, made a decision to begin the veto process of the Two Forks Dam,
dealt with the Alar crisis, proposed new food safety legislation, reorganized
Superfund, and proposed a comprehensive new Clean Air Act. We also moved-a
considerable distance towards having a new farm bill. It was a much faster start,
and undoubtedly, some of the current slowness is a consequence of a change of
Administrations that involves more than just administration, it involves a change
of party with all new faces in the top positions, and delays in identifying them and
getting them confirmed. The country does pay a price for doing things this way.
To add a reorganization onto that as an early order of business is essentially
saying to the world, "We're going to take two years off and rethink ourselves, we
hope you're still there when we come back." I didn't want to do it,,
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MR. WILLIAMS: What were the most frustrating aspects of being the
EPA Administrator?
MR. REILLY: There are certain endemic problems that EPA
Administrators cope with. One is personnel.. I know, going back to the beginning,
the White House tends to scrutinize EPA personnel more than it looks at some
other agencies. I was told directly by the Personnel Director in the Bush
Administration that no personnel appointments attracted more lightning than mine
at the White House. As a consequence, after I got my first round of people
cleared when a couple left, I was not able to get anyone cleared, or proposed to
the Senate again. I had" the people I wanted in the jobs, so it didn't really matter
much to me practically, but I thought it was unfortunate for the people I had in
"Acting" status that they never were able to get formally confirmed as Presidential
appointees by the Senate. I think that's really a consequence of the nature of the
business at EPA. It's a hot spot. It doesn't reward the White House much, it
seems to present many more problems, more abrasive encounters than good news.
From a President's perspective, EPA is just not a " feel good" place.
The regulatory review process is a constant frustration for an EPA
Administrator. On the one hand the Administrator has the authority to administer
laws and to prescribe regulations. However, that is circumscribed by an
Executive Order that requires OMB sign-off. That creates a situation in which the
Agency is always explaining to the Congress why it is not taking an action that
may be called for, on time, by a statute, while at the same time it is fighting on the
other side with OMB or the Competitiveness Council or its equivalent—there
always have been equivalents—to justify the economic impact of a regulation and
get the thing out as the law requires. That involves constant negotiation and I
suppose has proceeded more smoothly in other Administrations than it did in ours
We simply had an ideological chasm that divided me from the Budget Director,
for example, and from the Vice President on these issues. President Bush had
advertised that he wanted to be the environmental President; I thought that had
certain consequences for the priority and aggressiveness with which we should
carry out our functions: I got the impression from the White House that a number
of people had regretted the commitment and thought it no longer binding any
more than the "no new tax" pledge was taken seriously by some of them.
Those were the major frustrations. There were also some frustrations
with Congress at times. I remember testifying once on the reauthorization of the
Resource Conservation Recovery Act, on which we had elected not to play
because the Chief of Staff just didn't see anything in it for us, just didn't think we
would succeed if we did. I gave my honest opinions about some of the proposals
then pending before the Congress which would have significantly expanded the
responsibilities of EPA for regulating hazardous waste, taking the amount of
defined and regulated hazardous waste from under 300 million tons to over 11
billion tons as mining waste, for example, was added to the regulated mix. I
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pposed that and gave testimony that was taken as very conservative. I was
anscious of the fact that, first of all, we were barely making any sense of the
rogram we were administering. Secondly, I knew that the Appropriations
ommittees had no intention of giving us any more money. And, third, I
Dnsidered that the risk posed by a lot of this waste did not warrant nationalizing
ic problem.
But, the reaction on the part of some friends in the Committee was to
ly, poor Bill, look what they're making him say up here. I realized then the
sgree to which my position, my capacity to speak and be believed had been
jmpromised by the in-fighting that everyone knew was going on within the
dministration. I could have been more effective on that and some other issues if
lere wasn't the sense that there was a war occurring behind my back.
That was not a new phenomenon with me. Other Administrators had had
any more problems of the sort that I had, and yet, what was distinct about my
tuation was that my President was the environmental President. So, there was
;e added note of disappointment, if not perceived hypocrisy, in the reaction of
>me of the pro-environment people in the Congress. They just didn't see the
jlicy conforming to the promise. That was a source of frustration and
sappointment to me. It didn't need to be that way. We could have had a range
'environmental legislative initiatives that addressed the water quality problem in
laginative new ways and that made sense economically. In fact, we could have
;hieved more reforms if our body language and our public presentation had been
ore forthcoming and aggressive, if we'd not created the impression of intense
nbivalence about this area of public policy.
MR. WILLIAMS: How do you define your environmental philosophy?
MR. REILLY: My environmental philo5;pphy fundamentally starts with
moral, if not a religious conviction that we have a responsibility to maintain the
tegrity of the natural systems that sustain life. The created order is itself holy, in
sense. And we, as a part of it, have an obligation. One of the obvious and first
)ligations in any moral system is to sustain life, protect life, protect the
iderpinnings of life. So, I believe in sustainability, or sustainable development,
use the current phrase.
I have never considered myself a preservationist in the sense that I resist
iman interaction or intervention or even redirection sometimes of nature. I am a
imanist. I believe, in fact, that humans have improved upon nature. Much of
irope has been reshaped by a very sensitive system of agriculture that has been
mcerned with productivity over the long term. The concepts of stewardship
oneered by the Benedictines who developed new strains of grape and grains is
se that I have studied and deeply admire.
Before I became EPA Administrator I resisted calling myself an
ivironmentalist because to me that had a connotation, particularly with others, of
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obstructionism, of excessive preservatiomsm, of negativism, of anti-growth, of
anti-government,' ant'Wnffustfy* anti-bigness. It needn't have that connotation, bu
to a lot of'people it certainly did.
I call myself a conservationist. By that I mean someone more in the
tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who believed that nature
should support human activities and can be depended upon to do so provided tha
more is not taken out than is put back; provided that there will be as much to
support life in the next generation as there is in this one, provided that if you viex
it as a banking account, you're not always just making withdrawals.
I am just as concerned with poverty and the lack of development as I arc
with protection. I believe that the wisest form of protection is, in fact, creation.
It's not enough to put fences around places and try to keep people out of them.
One has to figure out a productive interaction that will make sense to people and
cause them to think that their needs come first, as they must.
I find the notion of people as a pollution abhorrent. Humans have
evolved right along with the rest of nature, of flora and fauna, and intelligent life
is the crowning achievement of the created order. I believe both that humans are
responsible for the earth, and that we're the best thing on it. That's a somewhat
conservative philosophy for a contemporary environmentalist. (After so many
years seeing the press characterize me as an environmentalist, and seeing that
nearly 90% of the American public regard themselves as environmentalists, I
accept the term for myself). But, mine is, I think, a philosophy that can comman
popular support and that's realistic. I've worked a lot in the developing world am
one does not bring to problems there a priority that requires people to do without
so we can keep natural systems healthy. One has to craft a system that builds ne'
economic structures that will be reasonably protective of natural systems. But
meeting human needs is the first priority. If these are not fulfilled, the system of
prelection will not endure.
Rene Dubps1, writings have influenced me. I believe it was he who
distinguished between the two traditions that have shaped Western conservation,
traditions that began with two Saints from Umbria. One is the tradition
established by Saint Benedict, who believed in shaping the land, organizing it foi
agriculture. Benedictines introduced crops and vines and fruits as far north as
Scotland. They were growers, cultivators, and builders. They were also fine
conservationists. The other great Umbrian Saint was Francis, who was a
preservationist, really, who preached the profoundest reverence for what in his
time were seen to be perfectly useless birds and wolves. Nothing like him had
ever teen seen before in Western thought. The Franciscan perspective has
survived and come down to contemporary history through Henry David Thoreau
and John Muir in America. And the Benedictine world view traces to our time
through Thomas Jefferson and Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. I
suppose I feel more comfortable with the latter, Benedictine outlook than with th
Franciscan philosophy, simply because the wild world in which to apply Francis1
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precepts is so nrnch smaller and more limited. Elut both views are powerful and
Compelling. And elements of both are necessary to a fully rounded conservation
Dhiiosophy. Fundamentally, I believe that creation is the most intelligent and
;nduring form of protection.
In terms of my application of that philosophy to my responsibilities at
3PA, I tried first of all, to cast the environmental issue in a new way. I wanted to
iffect how Americans thought about environmental issues, to change somewhat
'heir environmental philosophy, to bring them to accept that regulatory.priorities
should be risk-based, and science-driven. I wanted those concerned about the
jnvironment to engage the broader world, to recognize the. vital relationship
jetween environmental protection and trade. I worked to promote understanding
)f the need to give the environment a much higher priority in U.S. foreign policy,
'or several reasons: the necessity to have international cooperation in solving so
nany environmental issues important to the United States, and also because, if
fou truly accept the concept of comparative risk as a basis for setting priorities,
hen you have to attend to the environment of the developing world where
jroblems of health and ecological deterioration are egregious. I stressed the need
o integrate environmental policies with economic decision making, both in the
Jnited States and internationally. And I made the case that natural systems
leserve as much attention as health. '
MR. WILLIAMS: What overall advice -\vouldyou give your successors
md the public?
MR. REILLY: I can recall being at a senior EPA staff review we had on
he Eastern Shore of Maryland when someone was delegated to complain to me
hat I was just imposing too many burdens on the Agency, too many priorities. I
emember responding to that. In fact, Linda Fisher, Assistant Administrator for
toxics and Pesticides, told me recently that she was shown by Gordon Binder, my
:hief of Staff, a note that I had written and handed to him as I left the meeting
vhere I had listened to that complaint. The note read, "Kick ass and take names,
here will be more priorities." i
In my oral answer to that concern, I used a little more diplomatic
anguage. I told the Agency's senior executives that in the lives of organizations,
here are periods of retrenchment, consolidation, reaction, and sometimes
[uiescence. And there are also great moments of opportunity, energy, excitement,
nd innovation. I very much believed that during my time at EPA we were riding
flood tide and that we had the obligation to make the most of our moment, not
:nowing how long it would last or whether or when it would come again. EPA
;as always been at its best when it viewed its role as not just custodial but as
utting edge, as formulating leadership, as prescribing the answers to problems, as
iirecting to the Congress what needs attention, as communicating to the country
/hat the big issues are and how they should be addressed.
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One sometimes hears, and some of the current Administration seem to
reflect this, that it is the job of the Agency to take Congressional priorities and
implement them. Lord, that is just wholly impractical because Congress has give
EPA totally diffuse and disconnected priorities. There's no way that you can
possibly respond to all or take them all equally seriously. The Agency is in a
unique position to function as the conceptual cockpit for environmental leadershi
not just in the United States but in the whole world. That is the role that I aspirec
Jo and I wouldencourage my successor to keep that standard high.
MR. WILLIAMS: What about the public?
MR. REILLY: The public needs to see arid hear EPA. It tends to respe
the mission but has a fairly uninformed view of what's involved. It's remarkable
how little the public understands about the Environmental Protection Agency. It
not l|e the Park" Service where the mission is obvious. Anybody who visits a
p^rk wili run into a Service that interacts regularly and directly with people.
Education is a large and important part of the job. It required a great
deal of outreach, a lot of attention to the message, a lot of effort to cultivate the
press and television, and simply to explain. I used to do a lot of that—not just
why it's more important to take my .approach than someone else's, but exactly
what the nature of the problem is, the issue itself—whether it's the Great Lakes o
the Chesapeake Bay or the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, or the acid ram
problem that impacts on the Northeast, or the consequences of our energy choice
or the border problems with Mexico. The public needs constantly to be remmde
of the fact that we all do make choices, and many individual choices have
consequences for the environment that people don't fully appreciate. Maybe we
don't really want to change some: aspectsof our behavior—conserve water, or
have the car regularly inspected, or car-pool, or refrain from developing our
wetlands, or leave our used oil at an approved collection center—because all the,
are inconvenient. I used to talk about things like inspection and maintenance of
automobiles, something the public resists and that is very badly run in most state
Every buyer of a new car spends $800 or so on the pollution equipment alone, 01
the computers, catalytic converters and the rest and can lose the air pollution
benefits of this investment totally by failing to maintain those systems. The
" nature of wetlands is a subject I used to talk a lot about. (I seem to have hit the
really popular programs hard, eh?). It constantly amazes me that for 25 years at
least American conservation groups have tried to publicize the very important
contribution of this diminishing, rich resource we have, its importance to
commercial fisheries and ducks and for filtering pollutants. Yet, every wetlands
fight we got into, we at EPA were on the defensive, with much less public suppc
than it seems to me the resource would warrant if it were better understood.
To me, that is evidence of the need for more interaction, more
communication. The public is smart" I think that when they are exposed to this
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of ^formation, given the general positive feelings toward the environment,
iey will get it, they will understand. To some extent they do, and that's why you
:e support for clean air and clean water holding high. But, there's more to be
jne there. The EPA Administrator is far more than a regulator and should see
Imself or herself as a major source of information, of encouragement, at times of
Aspiration, for the public at large. Someone who is known, is trusted, can
jmmunicate—sometimes to reassure people about the safety of the food supply,
:her times to raise a little hell because there's too much wasted oil being dumped
Dwn the toilets and down the drains and getting in the groundwater and: finally
to the bays and estuaries—it's all part of the job.
MR. WILLIAMS: You mentioned before an ideological chasm behveen
mrselfand the Budget Director, etc. I suppose historians will look at OMB and
PA's relationship at some point in time and make judgments along (hos'e lines.
s you know, you've studied history yourself, those will go in cyclical
rangements. But, on what grounds do you think historians should judge your
mire at EPA ? What do you think were your most significant accomplishments
j Administrator and what do you think were your biggest failures?
MR. REILLY: I think the most significant accomplishments
ere—somewhat in chronological order, I suppose—first, the elevation of
;ology and the signaling of the end to expensive and wasteful water development
the West, which I think is the message of the veto of Two Forks Dam. Second,
e elevation of science in the Agency that came with the decision to commission
e Science Advisory Board to do its report and then to give so much attention
id play and priority to see to it that its message was heard. It began to affect
>Iicy. Third, the enforcement vigor on my watch, which was unprecedented in
e number of referrals to the Justice Department for civil action and criminal
ises we filed. We assessed more fines during my four years than in the entire
•evious 18-year history of the Agency. And we put more people in jail for
jregious, willful environmental crimes than in the previous history of EPA.
Fourth, I would cite the effort to integrate environmental policy with our
reign policy, which we began very early, as early as the March 1989 delegation
at I headed to Mrs. Thatcher's conference on the ozone layer, in which 'then
mator Gore was a Delegation member. The constant publicity we gave to the
ratospheric ozone issue as a representative, emblematic problem, and the Treaty
nendments we negotiated phasing out ozone-depleting substances by 1995.
ere the world economy was acting over many years in a way that was disturbing
e fundamental life support system of the whole planet without any knowledge of
e consequences'of our actions. And then we began to address and correct that
•oblem internationally—in the only way we could, in cooperation and concert
ith other nations. We, at EPA, tried to influence the lending policies of AID, the
lining of the Peace Corps, which we began to undertake, the economic policies
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of the Treasury Department relative to the World Bank, and I introduced Presiden
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 me 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
Honcrlte 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
Chanceilor 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 i
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 Rip The Principles of Forestry that the world community did agree to at Rio i
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 wast
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-fiftt
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 63 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
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jirements to future land use, an important change necessary to reduce cleanup
:s and return derelict properties to productive use.
I believe that we legitimized both the concept and use of risk assessment
)ur watch. More than half the states undertook their own comparative risk
iies after we completed ours.
We also designed and demonstrated the value of market-based trading of
.utants in the acid rain title of our clean air bill, which is now law.
I believed very much that an excessively adversarial relationship had
racterized government-industry relationships in the United States, and that it
impeding progress. The many voluntary, collaborative programs we
iched, several like Green Lights and 33/50 which were very successful^
-onded to that concern. They began to inculcate in our professionals a more
:iisticated understanding of the possibilities open to them, the sense that they
Id, without compromising their aggressive enforcement responsibilities,
sue cooperative ventures with serious companies and sometimes solve
alems faster and more efficiently.
I think, looking back, the thing that I am proudest of is the fact that the
ntry, the Congress, and certainly the President, thought we were on the level.
were'honest people who had a sense of the direction that we should go in and
the country should go in, and we were competent and could be trusted. It's
/ important when you exercise the kind of power that we had at EPA that you
e credibility and that people—even smart and involved people cannot take the
3 to learn your metier—believe that you're taking the right things into account,
you have their interests at heart. I think, by and large, our public reputation
. consistent with that idea. If there were those who thought from time to time
we were too vigorous or perhaps not aggressive enough, they nevertheless
eved that we were serious.- That is probably the thing that I am the proudest of
ause I think it's what EPA most needed in my time.
In terms of my major failures and disappointments, I think that the Rio
iference has to stand out as the principal one. I can recall getting up as Head
delegation to deliver the speech for the United.States in Rio and my heart just
:ing as I moved toward the platform. It was clear to me that this should have
n the high point of America's environmental performance and leadership in the
Id. We, after all, were the country .that had done more to put the issue on the
>, to think it through, to develop environmental impact assessment, push clean
establish freedom of information and community right to know about toxic
ases, and advance pollution rights trading, and so many of the cutting edge
cepts of our time. No other country had reduced its pollution levels so much,
estored water bodies as we had. Virtually all the environment Ministers in Rio
w that. Nevertheless, America was on the defensive, isolated, criticized.
For me, personally, it ought to have been the high point of my career,
here I was heading the delegation which was widely seen as the malefactor.
; Financial Times of London reported my first press conference in Rio with my
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photograph under the headline, "Arrival of the Archfiend in Rio." They then g
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 thei
its abysmal oversight of the negotiation of the biodiversity convention left us
alone and beleaguered at Rio. The Administration was not sufficiently unified
make sure that the Convention on Biological Diversity was well-crafted and w;
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 arid 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. Th
President was personally very attentive and kind to me and my wife—and so w
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 t
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
ways that perhaps some of his Idvisoirs had never conceived—largely because
they just'didn't take the environment very seriously and they didn't think the w<
would, either. 1 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 1.4 days of worldwide press exposure and criticism. From
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 th<
Bush Administration, before the public and the country.
That wasn't necessary. I don't think that the conservatives in this cour
required it. I don't think it really helped with that wing of the Republican Part}
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 coul
otherwise have undertaken. We could have engaged in much more productive
debates about the reauthorization of RCRA, formulated our own concept, lobb;
it aggressively as we did the Clean Air Act, and finally gotten rid of some of th
dumber things in that law, had we retained our credibility.
One has to respect the fact that we had not just a divided Administrati
but we had a divided government. I don't think anything we could have done
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lid have won Cabinet status for the Agency. The Democratic leadership in the
jse simply was not going to permit that on Bush's watch. Some, in fact, have
litted it since. Some, like Senator Mitchell in the Senate were large, generous,
thought that the Agency belonged in the Cabinet and were prepared to bury
partisanship to put it there. We never got the same kind of generous outlook
le House. There were some long-term critics of the Agency like Dingell who
n in a Democratic Administration won't support putting EPA in the Cabinet,
might conceivably be willing to defer to a President of their own party: on
lething he felt strongly about. So, I regret not getting Cabinet status but I don't
k there was much I could have done to achieve that.
I regret not getting a new headquarters building. This is one of the
trations that my predecessors and I all suffered through. EPA Headquarters
a sick building! The very idea has a Woody Alien ring to it. I never
gined that five years after I took office I would look back and see that
igress has yet to approve our building and relocation plan. I succeeded in
ing the Administration to agree to assign to EPA the best building to come on
market on Pennsylvania Avenue smce the Depression, as Senator Moynihan
;nded me, congratulating me that the President supported my position.. But, I
i never get Eleanor Holmes Norton to sign off and she blocked approval of
> as the tenant by the House Public Works Subcommittee on Buildings.
ause, as she said at the time, she thought that building too worthwhile tp have
pie in it making decisions about sewers.
I would have liked to have a more productive relationship with a couple
ey members of Congress, but actually the reasons for the animosities felt by
ie members had to do with our aggressive advocacy of clean air and our
>rous lobbying of the Clean Air bill that they found loathsome. So that's not a
are, really, it's simply a consequence of making choices and being active,
ch 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
;ouldn't get the liberals to give up the Delaney clause, or the conservatives to
;e to strengthen EPA's cancellation authorities, so we reached an impasse.
v with the decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturning the:
mcy's interpretation of the Delaney clause, there will have to be food safety
slation. Our setback will have proved to be temporary. ;
I cared a lot about the Convention on World Forestry and got the
iident to propose that at the Houston summit in 1991 with some of the G-7
istrialized countries. We did not succeed in getting the developing nations to
:e to a convention, though we did get a Statement of Principles on Forestry,
ch I negotiated for the United States in Rio. Ultimately that will prove much
e valuable than the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was almost too
' to get the developing countries to agree to because it asked so little of them.
Convention on Forestry could make a very substantial difference to the
servation of a very large amount of flora and fauna that live in the forests of
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the world, particularly in the tropical forests. That's something for the longer t
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 ±e Environmental
Protection Agency; rather than as the air, water, and waste regulator of the Um
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,
vacuum needed to be filled and I happily filled it." But I don't think there is mi
^ye could have done that could have gotten that in our time, the developing wo
just wasn't ready for it and saw our concerns as potentially encroaching on the
sovereignty. I saw their anxieties first hand and they were genuine. India, Bn
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 han
the White House, itself, is largely implicated in that. I often had the feeling th;
probably all the heads of agencies must have, that if only I had had more latitu
to operate independently and to control issues and their presentation myself, w
would have done much better. 1 started by thinking I was the only non-politic
in the mix of Bush appointees dealing with the environment.' I ended up think
I was the only one with really much of a feelfor the politics of the environmer
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
silk purse into a sow's ear when we engaged issues like wetlands or the clean a
regulations with the Competitiveness Council. The Rio choices were a string <
bad political decisions motivated by discomfort with the issue and ideological
antipathy to envirorimentalism that ran very deep, I think, on the part of some
the principals. Arid it led to failures that disappointed me. But ultimately thos
decisions will not have any enduring significance because the underpinnings o
the apparatus and[the record that we set were very firm, were very strong: Bu;
environmental record is, in fact, very good, as people will acknowledge,
particularly when they compare it with the Clinton environmental record from
point of view of budget or enforcement or new initiatives. It will take time to
that. Only the Administration's own internal conflicts obscured that while we
, •,/:.• cc ' ' ' ' ' '
were in office.
It would have been possibie to overcome the antipathy of some of the
activist environmental organizations that communicate directly to the country
drawing on the credibility that we had, that I had particularly, with the press, tl
people that covered EPA, for example, or the White House press, had we not t
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
,78.
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imstration or of environmental performance, where I think we actually; did
r respectably.
MR. WILLIAMS: In timing that question, I didn't mean to end on a
itive note, but that's my final question. Do you have-any concluding remarks?
ere something that in the past,, probably -what's going to turn out to be seven
a half hours of tape beginning in July and ending finally here in November,
you haven't mentioned that you think is worth mentioning or that one of my
'tions hasn't addressed that you think is worth mentioning?
MR. REILLY: You know there are so many areas of .policy that we
d go into in more detail, but no, I can't think of any questions you haven't
d. You really have covered it. You know, I think some people look back at
Deriod and consider that we started so well and ended badly. I find myself
iduced, sometimes, as the voice that cried in the wilderness, as someone who
to be the conscience of the Bush Administration on the environment. ;I went
that job with no illusions. I knew all of my predecessors; I knew how much
lict there had been and how many disappointments some of them had had in
times. In fact, I had many more than my share of good days. I remember
Ruckelshaus said as he announced his retirement, his resignation from EPA,
an EPA Administrator gets two days in the sun, the day he's announced and
lay 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
•ge Bush and to the relationship that I had with the President. My relationship
him was more congenial, much more personally satisfying, I think, than any
y predecessors had had with the Presidents they served. It resulted in much
5 achievement. That it was less successful politically than it might have been
•gely the consequence, I believe, of decisions made at the White House that I
pted at the time with a sense that they never involved any moral compromise
vere prudential judgments on which reasonable people could differ.
sures that I was subjected to I could resist, and did resist, when I thought they
improper and there were no recriminations for that. It was a clean
inistration. It was an honest and ethical Administration.
Although it is the new initiatives and controversial decisions that
rnment officials make that receive most attention, the life blood of the
icy, 99 percent of the things it does for the environment attract relatively little
tion. The permits that are written, the approvals and denials of permission to
wetland or open a waste facility or set a standard or pesticide tolerance, and
uality of the staff work that goes into such decisions—these are the principal
minants of environmental quality, what really add up to the integrity of the
itjon. With that perspective in mind, it is thanks largely to the quality of the
le who work at EPA, their zeal, their commitment, the fact that for them it's
List a job, they really believe-in what they're doing and that they are doing
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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 count
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 ale
for that ride.
• i
MR. WILLIAMS: Thank you for your time.
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