EPA: Up From the Ashes

Something good is happening at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The danger in pointing this out is that the White House might not like this attempt at renaissance and order EPA to return to its medieval ways.

Just a few years ago EPA was virtually moribund. Its budget had been slashed repeatedly and deeply. The agency essentially was the captive of the Office of Management and Budget and then Interior Secretary James G. Watt. EPA’s first director under President Reagan, Anne Gorsuch Burford, had been driven from office amid allegations that she manipulated the agency for political purposes. Morale was at rock bottom, and many of EPA’s best people had fled to other jobs.

EPA was on the Administration’s hit list even before Reagan was elected. During the 1980 campaign, he contended that overzealous environmental regulation bore much of the blame for the problems facing American businesses.

Today the Reagan Administration has done no turnaround on environmental protection. And EPA is hardly in the vanguard of stringent environmental regulation. But at least the shattered agency is back on its feet from a management standpoint under the quiet guidance of Administrator Lee M. Thomas, a veteran of two decades of work in the state and federal bureaucracies. And now, with White House attention focused elsewhere, EPA is beginning to advance some initiatives of its own.

Thomas strongly supported the renewal of both the Clean Water Act and the Superfund program for the cleanup of hazardous wastes. He directed a task force of agency professionals to examine EPA programs to make sure that the agency was focusing on the most urgent problems. Now he has suggested the enactment of federal legislation to protect the nation’s groundwater supplies.

While they may not be entirely happy with EPA, members of Congress and the environmental movement should recognize the positive advances that have been made by Thomas recently and should encourage this development.