The EPA Today and Yesterday

Expectations versus reality

ZWERDLING: William Ruckelshaus was the first EPA administrator when it opened shop under President Nixon in the early 1970s and, as deputy attorney general, he gained fame when he refused to fire special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. He's considered a man of integrity. But can he really change the EPA?

ALTER: The biggest change that Mr. Ruckelshaus can make is to rebuild public confidence that the environment and health will be protected. The remaining question, and just as large, is what other changes he's going to make. Will he, under whatever external pressure, seek more and more regulation, as had been the trend under President Carter? Or is he going to try to re-express what I believe to be the Reagan administration's view—achieve protection, but at a lower cost?

ZWERDLING: Let's say that Mr. Ruckelshaus simply tries to enforce the environmental laws now on the books. How can he possibly do it when his budget is in shreds? The Reagan administration's budget request for EPA this coming year is one-third less than what President Carter asked in his last year in office; President Reagan wants almost 50 percent less for research at EPA than actually was spent in 1981; the staff has been slashed by almost 20 percent.

ALTER: But those are nonsensical numbers, because every president puts in an inflated budget request, especially when it's his last year. Everyone knows that a final-year request is not going to Congress, is not perceived as reality by Congress: It's a fictitious number, and it's the wrong one to use for comparisons.

DAVIES: They're very meaningful numbers. The research and development function within the agency has been basically devastated by the Reagan budget cuts. Major parts of the agency—pesticides, toxics, enforcement—similarly have been terribly handicapped, if not destroyed altogether. The agency's responsibilities have increased tremendously and there is no way, despite statements from the administration, that you can do more work with less money when you have a reasonably efficient operation to begin with. The workload essentially has doubled in a lot of programs, and the budget has been halved. The results already have shown up in the law not being adequately enforced.

ZWERDLING: If you were going to take over EPA right now, what could you do and not do, given the budget?

PORTNEY: I would try to do what I think Ruckelshaus is going to try to do. That is, wrangle a supplemental appropriation for this fiscal year. Also, I'd try to get some kind of supplement to what the administration has requested for FY 1984. Obviously, I wasn't privy to the conversation between Mr. Ruckelshaus and the president, but I would guess that one of the terms he got the president to agree to before he would accept the job is an increase in the EPA budget.

ZWERDLING: But let's suppose that the EPA will have pretty much the same amount of money it had last year. What can it accomplish?

PORTNEY: That's a fairly difficult question. Keep in mind that even in the Carter administration, when the budgets were much higher than they are now, EPA was behind in getting out standards for all new sources of air pollutants, behind in approving State Implementation Plans to regulate air quality in the fifty states, behind in issuing water pollution standards, behind in a lot of respects. One reason for that was a budget that was inadequate in view of the tremendous responsibilities that Congress loads on the EPA year in and year out. It's an easy way for Congress to appear to be doing a lot about the environment, but it has the effect of creating an agency that's going to be perpetually behind on these deadlines.

ZWERDLING: So you're saying that Congress is actually creating unrealistic expectations among the public?

PORTNEY: In a lot of cases, it is. In many other cases, EPA is given a fairly general mandate but chooses to interpret the mandate in such a way that it's going to be chronically behind the deadlines that Congress establishes.

Cleaning up toxic wastes

ZWERDLING: Let's talk about a specific: can EPA clean up the country's toxic waste dumps?

ALTER: Well, we're talking about priorities. Of course you clean up the dumps; it's a question of which ones come first.

ZWERDLING: The EPA has identified 418.

ALTER: That doesn't include federal sites, and the federal government has been guilty as well of having inadequate facilities. Also, some other sites have been omitted. But whether you have 400, 500, or 600—which ones come first?

DAVIES: I would disagree in thinking it's just a matter of priorities. It's also a matter of changing basic strategies in the agency. Up till now the agency has chosen to negotiate with the dumpers first and to clean up later, which accounts for much of the delay. The law allows them to clean up first.

ZWERDLING: Let's go back to the basic question. Given the amount of money that EPA has now, and will have over the next years, can the government clean up those 400-some toxic waste dumps that citizens are so worried about?

PORTNEY: No. It's clear that there's not enough money in the Superfund to clean up the 418 priority sites or a number of other sites not on the priority list, but of serious concern to local residents. The important point is that there is enough money to begin cleaning up some of the most serious sites. Failure to do so results from two things: (1) As Terry indicated, the EPA has preferred to negotiate with the parties they think are responsible for the mess before cleaning up the sites; and (2) political problems always exist when there are representatives who want their site rather than someone else's cleaned up first. But there certainly is enough money to begin. To my mind, there is no way to explain or to offer an alibi for the delay in taking that money and beginning to work on the worst sites.

ALTER: The Superfund and,indeed, the congressional appropriations are not all the money that is available. There's a dynamic process going on that leverages the money. In short, you can use all the strategic tools at once: you can get people to settle out of court and speed it up; you can go after the scofflaws and collect from them; and you can use the reserve fund to clean up. Also, we need to marshal enough engineers and other knowledgeable people to do the job right. In fact, we don't have a lot of experience in cleaning up hazardous sites and perhaps what's worse than a hazardous site is to make it even more dangerous with an inept cleanup.

Future priorities

ZWERDLING: The Congress and President Reagan have only a short time to address the nation's environmental problems before the next election. What are the priorities going to be? What should they be?

PORTNEY: When President Reagan was candidate Reagan, he was correct, I think, in criticizing decision making at EPA. He pointed out that the monitoring network was such that we had too little idea of whether things were getting better or worse, of which areas were improving, of which were deteriorating, and at what rates, and that we had too little knowledge of what roles the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes were playing in those areas where environmental quality was improving. So I thought that one of the administration's first moves would be to improve the air-quality and water-quality monitoring networks. And it's not proved to be so.

ZWERDLING: So one of your first priorities would be to figure out just how badly things are being polluted?

PORTNEY: Exactly. We have to know whether the programs we have in place now are really making any difference, or how much difference they're making, before we can know what kinds of changes to make in those programs.

ALTER: I would try both to gain the confidence of the public in the handling of hazardous wastes and to educate them that they can be managed safely. We suffer from a weakness in the law and a weakness in the language in that waste is classified either as hazardous or nonhazardous. That's like saying everything is either black or white, that people are either good or bad, that there's no gray area in between. The result is that we panic people into thinking that their health and even their lives are always in a great deal of danger, when this is not true.

DAVIES: Enforcement is a top priority. Also, one of the most discouraging things about this administration has been its attitude that if you don't know about a problem,it doesn't exist. As a result, nearly all the research on new environmental problems, as well as the monitoring, has been stopped.

ZWERDLING: So let's say you're the new administrator, what are you going to do about it?

DAVIES: You have to strengthen enforcement; you have to increase the resources to implement things like the Pesticides Act and the Toxic Substances Act; you have to change strategy on hazardous wastes so that you clean up first and negotiate later; and you have to have a major increase in your research and monitoring budgets so that you can begin to know whether you are addressing the right questions in the right way.

ZWERDLING: How do you predict that William Ruckelshaus will be remembered for his tenure at EPA?

PORTNEY: My guess is that he will be remembered for having restored credibility at EPA. I think he's going to do that. Above all, he is honest, and I think even if he makes decisions that are unpopular with environmentalists, he's going to do so after consulting with them and basing his decisions on careful scientific studies and as much other knowledge as he can assemble. But I also think he may be remembered as a person who came back to an agency that was much easier to administer in his first stay than it will be in his second. There are many more laws and programs for the EPA to administer; it's a much more controversial area now than it was in the early 1970s, when there was little disagreement regarding such statements as, "Oh, we can't afford to do this, it's costing us too much," or "It's hurting our industrial base." That is not the case now, and I think Bill Ruckelshaus will find this is a far tougher job now than it was when he first had it.