Clinton Creates New Environmental Unit

President Clinton announced plans Monday to replace the 23-year-old Council on Environmental Quality with a smaller White House environmental policy office and reinforced his intention to elevate the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet status.

Although Clinton did not say so, it was clear that by creating a new White House Office on Environmental Policy, he was effectively providing Vice President Al Gore with a new portfolio as the nation’s ranking environmental official.

The Administration’s new office will be headed by 29-year-old Kathleen McGinty, a lawyer who served as Gore’s top environmental aide during his last three years in the Senate. As director, she will participate in each of the Administration’s major policy councils: the National Security Council, the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council. She also will work closely with the other relevant federal agencies.

At the same time, Clinton formally announced that his Administration will send legislation to Congress making the Environmental Protection Agency a bona fide Cabinet department, and the Senate Government Affairs Committee promptly scheduled hearings for next week on the proposal. A similar measure proposed by the George Bush Administration failed to gain approval by the House of Representatives.

Because Congress established the Council on Environmental Quality in 1969, congressional approval also is required to dismantle the organization, which faded from prominence during the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations but retained its chief responsibility of administering the National Environmental Policy Act.

Most mainline environmental groups, whose leaders had been briefed by Gore on Sunday, quickly endorsed the changes.

“What is important to me is that people from the staff of the new office will be attending meetings of the National Security Council and the Economic Policy Council,” said George Frampton, president of the Wilderness Society. “For the first time, we have a procedure to bring environmental considerations into national security, foreign and economic policy.”

Similar endorsements came from the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund and others.

But there was also a note of sharp discord.

Former CEQ staff member Roger McManus, who is now president of the Center for Marine Conservation, called the move “terrible judgment.”

“What we have,” he added, “is a time-honored government ploy of appearing to take dramatic action without having thought through the consequences of the action. I think the President ought to reconsider.”

McManus predicted that the elimination of CEQ will encounter significant opposition in Congress.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a key figure in the congressional decision, issued a carefully drawn statement noting that the council “performs many important functions.”

His committee, he said, will “need to review the details regarding how these functions will be handled by the new Office of Environmental Policy.”