The Earth Needs the Clout : Environment: Government does run on power, and the EPA should have more. Elevate it to the Cabinet.

Protecting the environment has become perhaps the most important issue of our age. Global warming, deforestation, destruction of wetlands, soil erosion, desertification, air and water pollution and loss of biological diversity are some of the challenges we are facing.

Combined with rapid population growth, they represent critical problems that contribute to the breakdown of social, political and economic stability around the world. This has serious implications for international order, including the national security interests of the United States.

Global environmental and resource issues will inevitably become the focus of world affairs for the foreseeable future. The environment was a central topic at last year’s Paris economic summit, and the world’s economic powers now recognize that strong steps must be taken soon if the global environment is not to suffer irreparable harm.

The Environmental Protection Agency is nearly 20 years old. There were those in 1970 who felt that concern for the environment was a passing fad. Events have proven them dead wrong. Environmental protection today is widely recognized as central to the long-term health and well-being of the American people.

Since its creation, a series of new mandates has been imposed on the EPA by Congress in such areas as toxic-substance control, safe drinking water and the Superfund. It also has become clear that protecting the environment is the broadest and most complex issue confronting the nation. The EPA’s constituency, by definition, has to include the entire population, and its mission has implications for almost every sector of government--energy, agriculture, health, transportation, public lands, urban affairs, business, labor, defense and foreign affairs, among others.

Yet the EPA does not have the status of the other government agencies with which it must work to protect the environment. The EPA should be elevated to the Cabinet for the simple and compelling reason that environmental protection is an overwhelmingly important issue, both domestically and internationally. To do less is an anomaly in today’s world.

It is worth noting that the EPA’s budget and staff are larger than those of several federal departments. Certainly, the economic impact of the EPA’s activities is far greater than that of most departments.

But the administrator of the EPA remains the bureaucratic inferior of the heads of the Cabinet departments, putting environmental interests at a disadvantage in the normal government give-and-take.

Almost every regulatory initiative by the EPA becomes the subject of extensive--and sometimes seemingly interminable--interagency review. Elevating the EPA to departmental status will help ensure that important regulations do not get lost in the bureaucratic maze.

By the very nature of its responsibilities, the EPA often has a legitimate interest in the way other agencies carry out their business. Thus, when the Department of the Interior was recently considering the renewal of long-term water leases in the West, the EPA expressed its concern over the impact of that action on water quality and requested an environmental impact study. Interior signed the leases without acceding to the EPA’s request.

Relatively senior agencies not infrequently look on the EPA as something of a busybody that sticks its nose into others’ business. This reaction is doubtless in keeping with longstanding bureaucratic tradition, but it must be stopped.

It would be naive to suggest that problems of this sort are going to be solved simply by making the EPA a department. The clout of an agency head will be in direct proportion to the support he or she receives from the President. If a future EPA administrator has the kind of support and access that President Bush has given William K. Reilly, the agency will have a strong voice. If the chief environmental officer does not have the support of the President, his technical status will make little difference.

Nevertheless, the realities of government are such that it is not practical to elevate more than a few issues to presidential level. Most decisions are worked out on the staff level, and it is here that placing the EPA on an equal footing with Cabinet agencies will be particularly important.

Departmental status would enable the EPA to carry out its responsibilities more effectively. Environmental protection has risen to a position of such critical importance on the national and international agenda that it demands the best we can bring to it.