EPA Chief Critiqued -- Naturally

In her first two years as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman’s influence on Bush administration environmental policy is best charted by actions not taken.

The administration, for instance, contemplated launching a wholesale review of the 1972 Clean Water Act in response to a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that removed some isolated waters and wetlands from the act’s reach.

“We said no,” Whitman said in an interview. She argued that the court ruling should not trigger “a big fishing expedition to send out the signal that we wanted to completely redo the Clean Water Act.”

She and her opponents within the administration “went at it,” she said, and the White House ultimately sided with her in the wetlands policy announced last month. The wetlands example, repeated in a number of other major internal policy debates, shows Whitman’s ability to moderate the influence of other administration officials who represent the views of the energy industry, developers and manufacturers, according to Republican members of Congress, industry lobbyists and Whitman herself.

“There have been some issues where ... I pushed back against some of the other forces” in the administration, Whitman said. “I’ve been able to convince people that the way we were looking at it was the appropriate way to look at it.”

Her few major policy initiatives either await congressional approval or are too new to show any impact. And despite her ability to stop an overhaul of the Clean Water Act, she has signed several significant environmental regulations that environmentalists consider rollbacks. For instance, she altered Clean Water Act rules to enable mountaintop removal mining to continue and overhauled the “new source review” provisions of the Clean Air Act to allow industries more flexibility in deciding when to install modern pollution control equipment.

Environmentalists, who cling to Whitman as practically their only ally in a hostile administration, chalk her record up to their belief that she is hopelessly outnumbered. Democratic members of Congress commiserate with her and suggest that the administration’s record is not her fault.

Both groups refrain from criticizing her, for fear of offending their only friend on Bush’s team.

Ironically, Whitman finds this attitude offensive.

She says her reputation for protecting the environment, which stems from her cleaning the beaches and preserving open lands while she was governor of New Jersey in the 1990s, has been stretched into an insulting caricature. She objects to suggestions that she has reluctantly signed several of the EPA’s most consequential regulations after losing battles with the White House.

“At the end of the day, every regulation that I have signed for the agency, I have been comfortable with and felt that we were moving forward and improving and enhancing the environment,” Whitman said.

Environmentalists such as Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope simply refuse to believe that Whitman means what she says. He thinks she is an unwilling participant in Bush administration actions that will allow the worst air polluters to keep polluting, ignore the huge problem of global warming and permit the destruction of countless wetlands.

“I don’t think she’s a marvelous environmental advocate,” Pope said, “but we have enormous evidence that she did not believe in what the administration did on climate change, and she did not believe in the package of things that the administration has done on clean air.”

Pope was referring to President Bush’s decisions to reverse his campaign pledge and oppose regulating carbon dioxide from power plants and to drop out of the international climate change negotiations that produced the Kyoto Treaty. Whitman, who had supported the policy of regulating carbon dioxide and reiterated it in Washington and abroad, now toes the new administration line.

On the contrary, Whitman says. She wholeheartedly supports the administration’s goal of giving industry new leeway to determine how it will meet environmental goals. Business will clean up only if cleaning up is in its own interest, she argues, and the government can make that happen by setting up systems that make it financially advantageous for industry to reduce pollution.

Environmentalists see the world -- and especially industry’s role in it -- through different prisms. They believe that business will clean up only if threatened by tight enforcement of tough environmental regulations.

This disagreement might begin to explain why Whitman and environmentalists have such different views of her tenure.

In contrast to the green lobby, congressional Republicans and industry lobbyists offer a description of Whitman’s role that much more closely parallels her self-portrait.

“I can think of few voices that can be more effective in inner circles than Christie Whitman’s,” said House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.). “I think she’s fighting the good fight, but she doesn’t always succeed. It’s a very tough battle.”

One example of her influence, Boehlert said, was the decision to reinstate a Clinton administration initiative, initially rejected by the Bush team, that will cut the allowable level of arsenic in drinking water by 80%.

“She is making a difference,” agreed Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, one of the Senate’s most influential Republican environmentalists. “She’s working for an administration that got votes from ranching, timber and mining states. That makes her job very hard.”

She is helped, they say, by her close relationship with her fellow former governor, Bush. She gave him a Scottish terrier named Barney and has spent weekends at Camp David, the presidential retreat.

In the case of the wetlands proposal, the administration had tentatively planned to use the Supreme Court decision to respond to requests by developers to broadly review the law’s scope, according to congressional aides, lobbyists and environmentalists. Instead, the EPA announced a more narrow reexamination focused on isolated waters and wetlands.

“She came in at the eleventh-hour and single-handedly got critical changes,” said a top industry lobbyist, who did not want to be quoted by name for fear of losing access. “She prevailed. That is power.”

The regulatory actions that earn Whitman the worst marks among environmentalists are her changes and proposed changes in the so-called new source review program of the Clean Air Act.

Under new source review, polluting industries must install modern pollution controls when they modify or renovate their facilities in ways that would increase pollution. Whitman’s changes and proposed changes would give industry more ways to avoid installing the devices and more flexibility to determine when to install them.

Industry lobbyists said that Whitman’s influence prevented the proposal from being more to their liking.

But environmentalists and pro-environment members of Congress say the proposal constitutes a major failure by Whitman to protect the environment. Even Boehlert said he believed Whitman lost the battle on new source review and is now “playing the good soldier.”

They say her proposal has undermined lawsuits filed by states and the federal government against eight utilities and three dozen of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants, which together pump hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants into the air each year.

But Whitman rejects the suggestion that she would do anything to hurt those cases. When she was governor, she added New Jersey to the list of states suing the utilities. Whitman said that she told the officials drafting the administration’s policy the cases were “sacrosanct.”

Whitman lashed out at the states’ attorneys general who blame the administration for the fact that the lawsuits have languished since Bush was elected.

“As a governor, ... it was four years ago that we brought those cases and nothing has happened yet,” Whitman said. “That’s the problem.”

Drawn-out court battles such as these and problems with industries dodging regulations could be avoided, she said, if Congress passed the Clear Skies initiative, the president’s plan for attacking pollution from power plants.

A market-based plan, it would distribute pollution permits to utilities. Plants that cleaned up could sell their extra pollution permits to plants that remained dirty. Driven by the financial incentives, she argues, industry would voluntarily reduce pollution.

“It would be so much better if we had something like Clear Skies where you don’t have that resort to the courts,” she said.

Her Clear Skies proposal attracted little attention in the last Congress, but its prospects appear to be improving since Whitman met with Bush just before Christmas.

“At the conclusion of the meeting, the administration began to demonstrate externally for the first time a serious vigor for the proposal,” said a Republican environmental expert who did not want to be quoted by name about a confidential meeting.

Whitman said she believed that with Republicans holding the majority in both houses of Congress, the measure now has a “good possibility” of passing.

Even environmental activists give Whitman kudos for a handful of accomplishments. She prodded Congress to pass a bill to clean so-called Brownfield sites -- thousands of moderately polluted parcels of land across the country. She approved a plan that forces General Electric Co. to cover most of the costs of a $460-million cleanup of the Hudson River. And Whitman also completed a proposal by the previous administration to slash emissions from diesel trucks and buses.

But environmentalists and some former EPA officials charged that these accomplishments pale compared with the policies she has backed that will hurt the environment. Whitman, they said, should have followed the example of some of her predecessors, who refused to endorse initiatives they thought harmful.

Whitman countered that the need for such dire tactics has yet to arise. “I’ve come close to the edge, but I’ve never had to say my way or the highway,” she said. Whitman does not apologize for acting like a member of the Bush team.

“The president was elected to run this country, I wasn’t. The policy at the end of the day has to be his,” she said. “But I am not going to sit back or put my name to anything that I think is going to harm the environment. I care about it. I care about my reputation.... If it comes to that I will just quietly depart. But it hasn’t happened. Many of those who imply that it has already, have an agenda.”