William Ruckelshaus is sworn in as administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency as President Richard Nixon looks on at the White House on Dec. 4, 1970.
Charles Tasnadi/APThe Environmental Protection Agency has a pretty simple mission in principle: to protect human health and the environment. It's a popular purpose too. Nearly three out of four U.S. adults believe the country "should do whatever it takes to protect the environment," according to a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center.
Political support for the EPA, though, is less effusive.
On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Scott Pruitt as the newest administrator of the EPA, despite protests from Democrats, scientists and nearly 800 former employees of the agency. Pruitt has made a career out of suing the EPA as Oklahoma's attorney general. Until recently, his own LinkedIn profile described him as a "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda."
Donald Trump, his expected boss, has said that he wants to get rid of the agency, before backtracking to say he wants to "refocus" it. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed separate bills that would gut the agency or eliminate it altogether.
This isn't the first time that the EPA's role — or even its need — has been questioned.
"We've seen the fortunes of the agency rise and fall in different administrations," says William K. Reilly, administrator of the EPA under President George H.W. Bush.
What's changed is how the public perceives environmental issues and how political support has shifted with it.
Born with bipartisan support
The EPA wasn't always such a politically polarizing agency. It was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who created the EPA in 1970. In the following years, he also signed off on the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act with broad bipartisan support, cementing a legacy as one of America's greenest presidents. But it wasn't his intention.
"It wasn't an issue that particularly interested him," says William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA. "But he didn't feel he could resist the public pressure to take this on, to do something about pollution."
Public pressure was immense. The environment was one of the top issues people voted on and politicians felt it. The Clean Air Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 73-0. Not a single lawmaker — Republican or Democrat — voted against it.
In those days, Ruckelshaus says, people viewed the environment and public health as one and the same.
"It could have just as easily been the Public Health Protection Agency," Ruckelshaus says, of the EPA.
Smog hovers over the Los Angeles skyline on July 15, 1978.
Nick Ut/APPollution was rampant. The air in urban areas was thick with acrid smog. Eagles — a national symbol — were nearly extinct. Lakes, rivers and streams were contaminated by sewage and industrial runoff. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire.
When Nixon created the EPA in 1970, it was a political calculation. In the decades since, the factors and math behind that calculation have shifted — some administrations have pushed for broader environmental protections, others have dialed them down or aimed to roll them back.
The Reagan years
NPR talked to three former administrators of the EPA and a half-dozen other career employees of the agency and all said that for various reasons, the situation that's unfolding currently with Pruitt and the Trump administration is unprecedented.
Most though said that the closest parable to what's happening today, is what happened under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.
"Reagan came in promising deregulation and making some of the same claims that we are hearing today," Reilly says.
In 1982, NPR reporter Wendy Kaufman described the Reagan administration's stance on the EPA like this: "Officials say many regulations add enormous cost to industry and consumers without any real environmental or health benefits. They believe past enforcement efforts were often misguided. And finally, they say, environmentalists are paranoid, seeing problems where none exist."
The EPA saw its budget slashed in its first two years under Reagan. Its enforcement arm also saw cuts.
But it didn't go well. Within two years, the agency's administrator Anne Gorsuch — mother of current Supreme Court Justice nominee Neil Gorsuch — was forced to resign because of an administrative scandal. Another EPA official was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath. Ruckelshaus was called back in to right the ship and he says that public support for the agency swelled. Again, it became an important issue to voters and the political calculation changed with it.
In the 1988 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush called himself an environmentalist and became the first presidential candidate to campaign on the issue of climate change.
He won.
Public support remains high
Through all of the ups and downs of the EPA, Reilly says, it's important to remember that public popular support for environmental protection has remained high. There is a growing partisan divide on environmental issues and fewer people identify as an environmentalist now than they have in decades past.
"Environmental groups have basically become an arm of the Democratic Party," Ruckelshaus says, a move that he thinks is a mistake. But polling for the environment remains stubbornly high.
There is a disconnect though. Why, if the majority of Americans feel that the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth, do environmental issues rarely come up in political debates. As ClimateWire pointed out, in the 2016 presidential campaign, there were "3 debates over 4 ½ hours, and zero climate questions."
People don't vote the issue. National security, health care, guns and trade policy, among others, were all viewed as more important to voters in the 2016 election.
Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment looked at that disconnect in 2005, while Reilly was an adviser.
"And the answer that came back was that the public essentially has concluded that there is no crisis," Reilly says. "That the kind of issues that were emergency issues that prompted the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency have been very well addressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
Other former EPA administrators and officials agree.
"People can't touch, smell and feel pollution the way they did back in the 1960s, the 1970s," Ruckelshaus says. "I think the EPA and state agencies have become a victim of their own success."
Changing tides
As administrator of the EPA, Pruitt has said that he would rely more on the states for environmental protections and look to reign in the federal government's role.
As Oklahoma's attorney general he sued the federal government on behalf of businesses, industry and constituents who felt that the EPA was overly burdensome.
"I can understand why people get frustrated with regulation because they always cause somebody to spend more money or change their behavior on issues where they feel like there might not even be a problem," says Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and administrator of the EPA under President George W. Bush.
But she, Ruckelshaus, Reilly and other former EPA officials say that there is still a pressing need for federal environmental protections.
"Pollution today is far more subtle," Ruckelshaus says. It's invisible greenhouse gases that cause global warming, or non-point pollution sources like the agricultural runoff from a farmer's land that makes its way to a river. Those are no less threatening than issues like a burning river, Ruckelshaus says. And in some cases — specifically, in terms of climate change — they can be even worse.
"As people are subjected to sea level rise and ever-increasing severity of storms, of floods, of droughts, they know something's going on," Whitman says. "They're often ahead of Washington in that."
And she believes that as those effects of climate change become more widely felt, the environment will become a top issue for voters again.
That is, she says, unless changes at the EPA and in the country's environmental regulations by the Trump administration don't do it first.
One way to imagine a world without the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to draw on our memory of what the environment was like before the agency was created in 1970. This can be approached from two perspectives: from the viewpoint of the physical environment and from the viewpoint of the social and political environment. The conduct of these practical exercises is timely in that the authority and survival of the EPA are now seriously threatened. The president and congressional Republicans have proposed funding and workforce reductions that will devastate the agency with respect to its capacity to protect human health and the environment. To prevent this catastrophe, it is instructive to explore the reasons why the EPA has lost public and political support.
The EPA was created in 1970, with strong bipartisan support, by a Republican president who was not particularly interested in environmental health issues. In creating the EPA, President Richard Nixon and Congress were responding to public outrage about the deplorable conditions of the environment. Public pressure for action was so intense that lawmakers could no longer ignore the problem. One did not need experts or highly sensitive technologies to convince the American people that the environment was highly polluted. Rivers were “catching on fire,” acute deaths from air pollution were commonplace in some US cities, hazardous waste sites were proliferating, and the air quality was so bad in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that street lights were turned on during the daytime to protect pedestrians crossing the streets and to prevent automobiles from colliding because of poor visibility.1 These awful conditions led to an explosion of highly vocal public support for environmental protection.
The EPA made such spectacular progress in cleaning up the environment over the first 30 years of the agency’s existence that our memory of what it was like in the 1950s and 1960s has been virtually wiped out. The “big dirties” have disappeared from the landscape. In spite of the fact that approximately 75% of Americans expressed support for environmental protection in a 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center,2 the public does not view the conditions of the environment as grossly offensive. Americans behave as if they believe that developing and enforcing environmental regulations, although still important, is no longer a national priority—that the mission of the EPA has been accomplished. Otherwise, why would we tolerate the massive roll back in the agency’s policies, budget, and staff proposed by EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and the Republican-controlled Congress?
Given the record of success just described and the impact the agency has had on public perception, it was necessary for the EPA and the community advocating for environmental protection to “reinvent” the field. Unfortunately, however, this never happened. Government agencies, like businesses, must continue to reinvent themselves and develop new strategies in response to competition and changes in the market; otherwise, they will become irrelevant. It was critical for the EPA to make the case that environmental protection is an activity that never goes away and that there are hazards in the environment even though one may not be able to see, taste, or smell them. In the absence of visible pollutants, the EPA needed to have put a human face on environmental protection by linking invisible pollutants to human health.
Consider the National Institutes of Health; the agency has grown from its humble beginnings as a hygiene laboratory with a focus on infectious diseases to become a federation of 27 institutes and centers with specific research agendas and a combined budget in excess of $33 billion.3 Although infectious disease research has remained an important part of the agency, it has reinvented itself in light of its success in eradicating the epidemic of infectious diseases, which resulted in an increase in life expectancy of approximately 30 years.4 Unlike the EPA, the National Institutes of Health did not become a victim of its own success but instead identified the new scientific challenges associated with the rise in life expectancy (e.g., increases in chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease) and redirected its research efforts.
Similarly, the EPA needs a communication strategy to convince the American people that the agency is just as important today as it was in the 1970s, along with a more proactive and inclusive management strategy that goes beyond enforcement of legal statutes by embracing economics and the social and behavioral sciences. The EPA needs to play a leadership role in promoting dialogue to facilitate a socially responsible transition away from dependency on coal and oil as a source of energy and manual labor in manufacturing. Otherwise, farmers, coal miners, and blue-collar workers will view environmental protection as a threat to their economic survival. It is difficult to convey passion and convince people that one cares about and understands their problems through press releases and fact sheets.
William Ruckelshaus, generally acknowledged to be one of the most successful EPA administrators, obviously understood this challenge and traveled around the nation to talk with state regulators and convene meetings in various regions. He also insisted that the agency conduct its business in a “fishbowl.”
The EPA must become more adept in responding to the social, scientific, and political changes occurring in the nation; otherwise, its role in government will continue to be diminished. The tension between jobs, economic growth, and pollution is not new; it has always been an issue associated with environmental protection. Even before the EPA was created, local residents would resist state regulatory efforts if jobs were threatened, and politicians and local governments were always concerned that industries would relocate to states that had the least burdensome environmental regulations (the so-called “race-to-the-bottom” effect).5 In the global economy, industries are no longer restricted to the continental United States in their search for cheap labor and weak occupational health and safety and environmental protection policies and practices.
Ruckelshaus has expressed the view that the EPA is a victim of its own success.6 Christine Whitman, another former EPA administrator, has opined that when the consequences of climate change, such as flooding from sea level rises and droughts, become more severe, public support for environmental protection will be renewed.6 My view is that the EPA’s current problems are related to its earlier success in cleaning up the environment, coupled with its failure to reinvent itself in the context of the dramatic reduction in visible pollution and economic and social changes that have occurred in the United States since 1970.
In summary, it is clear that the nation has reached a point at which decisions about the way forward in environmental protection need to be made. It was inevitable that the technology-driven, command-control approaches that were so effective in the remediation and prevention of regional or point-source pollution associated with human activity would need to be recalibrated to accommodate the shift from point- to scattered-source pollution (e.g., farm runoff and carbon emissions from use of fossil fuels) and changes in attitudes toward pollution on the part of the public, businesses, and local governments.
Although there are exceptions, the prevailing attitude is that environmental protection is good for both local governments and businesses with respect to recruitment of industries with high-paying jobs and profits, respectively. Because scattered pollution is more prone to drift across state boundaries, prevention will require more collaborative approaches involving the federal government and multiple states. Thus, the future roles of the EPA are to work with states in developing clear national goals, to develop and disseminate tools to allow monitoring of progress, to garner financial resources to assist less prosperous states in implementing prevention policies, and to grant more flexibility to state and local governments in achieving their goals.
The challenges that dominated the remediation and pollution control efforts of the EPA for its first 30 years have little resemblance to the challenges of the 21st century. Therefore, the EPA needs an inspirational, visionary leader who can bring warring factions together to achieve a common goal.
See also Morabia, p. 426; Sundwall, p. 449; Woolhandler and Himmelstein, p. 451; Gottfried, p. 452; Moffit, p. 453; Zimmer, p. 456; Bassett and Graves, p. 457; and Kirkham, p. 458.
Articles from American Journal of Public Health are provided here courtesy of American Public Health Association