Government Executive - Authors - Margaret Kriz

EPA feels like home to new administrator

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In her second stint with the Environmental Protection Agency -- the first spanned four presidential administrations -- Lisa Jackson has some perspective on what changed during the George W. Bush years and what the new president expects. Speaking about the $10.5 billion that Barack Obama has requested for the EPA in fiscal 2010, Jackson says: "I always remind people that that 30 percent increase comes after a 27 percent decrease over the last eight years." In an interview with National Journal's Margaret Kriz, Jackson discussed what's on the EPA's plate beyond climate change. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: I notice that you were on "The Daily Show" -- how'd that come about?

Jackson: That was a really good press shop. It was really fun. I'm still getting really funny e-mails from my friends.

NJ: When you took the EPA job, did you realize you'd have such a high profile?

Jackson: I really didn't.... I thought more about the policy implications, like, "Wow, implementation of the Clean Air Act." But the high profile comes with the job because environment and energy issues are so important to the president's agenda.

NJ: Last time we talked, in February, you said you'd live with the budget you received. Now you've got the president asking for a big increase, to $10.5 billion.

Jackson: It's definitely not an abundance of riches yet. I always remind people that that 30 percent increase comes after a 27 percent decrease over the last eight years. Some people would say, "Well, you're being made whole." But the interesting thing about the budget is that most of the increase goes to the state revolving funds and to a Great Lakes effort. So most of it, although it's coming to EPA, is heading right back out to the American people. A lot like the Recovery Act money.

NJ: Are those the areas that suffered the budget cuts in the past eight years?

Jackson: No, not entirely. EPA suffered a lot of across-the-board cuts that really affected its ability to hire outside experts, keep the science strong, to keep a focus on climate. So we're also investing in climate change. There are investments in research and development. The only places that we won't be able to invest a whole bunch of new resources is in bodies. The budget anticipates about 130 more FTEs [full-time equivalents], and that probably is OK because EPA did its best not to cut staff during the lean years. So now we get to take those staff and make them more productive. But we don't necessarily have to add a lot of staff.

NJ: You've been focusing on climate change. But what's the next big thing on your plate?

Jackson: In all the discussions on climate, which are great, we're also looking at water. We're starting to see lots of discussion on the Hill and lots of concern among the American people about the fact that water quality, although it's gotten better from point sources -- we still have major issues with non-point sources. Storm water runoff, agricultural runoff. Lots of concern about that. Lots of concern about toxics, about chemical assessment and management of risk associated with toxic chemicals. Lots of concern about non-climate aspects of the Clean Air Act. We have a huge regulatory agenda there.

So this budget also -- I should point out we're investing in each one of those priority areas and we're very much about making sure that our resources are lined up with our priorities.

NJ: You've had to hit the ground running here. How's your family taking the change?

Jackson: They've been great. My two sons are actually really excited about moving to Washington. Some of that is the attraction power of President Obama, who really appeals to young people; they're really excited and hopeful. My kids are no exception to that. It is hard -- the physical move and trying to get things up and running means time away from the family. But they know it's short-term, and hopefully within a month, we'll all be together. So we're going to make it.

NJ: So you're waiting for the school year to be over before you move them?

Jackson: Yeah. They're still in New Jersey, and I go home on weekends. I've only missed, I think, two weekends since January. Their school year ends the third week in June, and the boys will be up right after that. My husband will take a bit longer. Our house is on the market, all that kind of stuff.

NJ: People have talked a lot about the fact that Barack Obama is African-American and you are African-American. Does it make a difference as you approach your job at EPA?

Jackson: I do think there's a responsibility on my shoulders to make sure, to constantly remind EPA that we need to be looking toward the future. And one of the clear messages for that future is that future generations are going to be demographically different, and they have different attitudes about environmental protection than when EPA came to be [in 1970].

So the primary responsibility is just constantly being vigilant about reaching out to people of color, to communities across the country, and making sure that environmental protection is expanding its reach in who it communicates with, not contracting. We don't want environmentalism to be the province of a few. We actually -- the more successful we are at making everyone care about the environment and taking responsibility for it, the cleaner the environment will become.

NJ: Is there anything you want to add?

Jackson: You can't underestimate the fact that for me, it's a return. I worked at EPA at various jobs for 15 years, and that's been a tremendous advantage. I know the programs, but more importantly, I know a lot of the people. A lot of the senior managers have really stepped up because of those personal relationships, and because they're so grateful to have a president who values our mission. It's been a hard personal transition with family. But it hasn't been at all hard professionally, because of the attitude of the EPA staff, and I'm really grateful for that.

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EPA likely to see changes under next administration

Margaret Kriz — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a National Journal story exploring how much of a difference the next president will be able to make in a number of policy areas.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promises to create a more independent Environmental Protection Agency and to "reinvigorate the EPA, respecting its professionalism and scientific integrity." Essentially, that's a pledge to end Bush's practice of overturning the decisions of the agency's scientists and lawyers on top environmental actions. Obama's long-term environmental plans include revitalizing almost every program handled by the 38-year-old agency.

By contrast, John McCain has said relatively little about the role that EPA would play in his administration. Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who is supporting McCain, predicts that the Arizona Republican would appoint strong leaders to head the agency and the Interior Department, which have been plagued by scandals during the Bush administration.

Both McCain and Obama favor controlling greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade program. All of the climate-change legislation introduced so far would put EPA in charge of curbing global-warming pollutants, a step that would greatly expand the agency's authority over business and industry.

Obama, who spent two years on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also advocates stricter controls on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and on the pollutants released into the air and water by so-called factory farms. He wants to strengthen the Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup program and focus more attention on pollution problems in low-income communities. And he would restore funding for water-treatment systems.

Although some of those ambitious goals would require help from Congress, the next president will have broad administrative authority to shift EPA's priorities. But overhauling the agency and the nation's environmental policies would be a challenging job.

During the last seven years, the Bush administration issued rules that reshaped EPA's regulatory programs and weakened some environmental protections. To reverse those changes would take years because of the regulatory hurdles that would have to be cleared.

William Ruckelshaus, EPA's first administrator, has said he hopes that Obama wins the White House. Ruckelshaus knows a little about reinvigorating the agency. In the early 1980s, at a time when EPA was mired in scandal and controversy, President Reagan asked him to return to clean up the mess.

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EPA is missing in action on major environmental issues, observers charge

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Environmental Protection Agency is failing to live up to its name these days, its legions of critics agree. At a time when the nation's top environmental regulators face increasingly complex pollution problems, President Bush is pushing for dramatic cuts in EPA's budget, his administration's strained, pro-industry interpretations of environmental laws have repeatedly been laughed out of court, and the White House is widely perceived to be running roughshod over agency scientists and lawyers.

Environmental experts charge that the agency's vanishing act is undercutting environmental statutes and delaying much-needed new efforts to clean up the nation's air, water, and land as well as aggressively tackle global warming. "There has been a steady drumbeat of actions that this administration has taken to weaken clean-air protections in this country," says S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local pollution control officials. "Their actions have had very serious and substantial adverse impacts on our ability to provide health protection in this country."

Since the Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill in January 2007, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has been continually hauled before Congress to answer for the Bush administration's environmental policies. "I view this administration as environmental outlaws," Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer told National Journal. "Every time the EPA deviates from what their scientists recommend, we know one thing for sure: People will get sick, and some will die."

The California Democrat objects, for example, to the administration's recent rejection of the tough new health standard for controlling smog (also known as ozone) that EPA's independent scientific panel had recommended. Instead of taking the panel's advice, Johnson followed the president's orders and adopted an ozone standard that, many experts charge, includes weaker environmental protections. According to Boxer, "EPA's own analysis shows that Administrator Johnson's [ozone] decision ... could result in between approximately 1,000 and 2,000 more premature deaths each year."

Legal experts say that even more than under Bush's two previous administrators, Christine Todd Whitman and Mike Leavitt, Johnson's EPA is regularly pushed around by politically powerful advisers at the White House and in other departments. "There's a sense that the agency has not stood up for itself and has been run over by other interests in the executive branch -- and that it's happened under Steve Johnson's stewardship," said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Georgetown.

"He has not been a strong administrator, a strong voice in the administration," Lazarus continued. "In case after case, to the extent that the EPA career and science people have sought something, the White House has repeatedly trumped his judgment more than has happened in the past."

Critics acknowledge that ever since President Nixon created the supposedly independent agency in 1970, every EPA administrator has faced conflicts between what the agency's experts recommend and what the White House demands. "But it seems to me that that tension is now at an acute level," said Jonathan Cannon, director of the University of Virginia Law School's environmental and land-use program. "It's causing extreme friction within the agency and institutional damage. It's demoralizing the legal staff, and it's further separating staff from the political leadership at the agency." Cannon served at EPA during the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations.

EPA's current lawyers and scientists say that agency morale is almost as bad as it was in the early 1980s after President Reagan appointed pro-industry Anne Gorsuch Burford to head it. EPA's reputation fell so low under Burford that Reagan felt obligated to sack her and bring back William Ruckelshaus, the agency's beloved first administrator.

Burford's controversial tenure led EPA's professional staff to organize a branch of the National Treasury Employees Union in hopes of "being able to do our work with the minimum of political interference," said union Vice President J. William Hirzy, an EPA scientist. He charges that the Bush administration's tactics constitute "POLITICAL INTERFERENCE -- in all capital letters." As a consequence, Hirzy's group and three other employee unions have withdrawn from EPA's labor-management partnership council in protest.

White House meddling has pulled EPA "off to the extreme end of the right-wing perspective on the environment, reflecting not even a consensus within the Republican Party but the views of some who are particularly hostile to the agency's historic mission," says Daniel Esty, an environmental law professor at Yale who served as the EPA administrator's deputy chief of staff during the George H.W. Bush administration and now advises Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on environmental policy.

Into The Limelight

Although the White House seems to be calling the tune on the administration's environmental policies, most observers say that Johnson rarely objects. Johnson, 57, was elevated to administrator in May 2005 after decades of toiling in relative obscurity at the agency. Bush brags about Johnson's credentials as a 27-year EPA scientist. For his part, Johnson enjoys telling his staff and visitors about his travels on Air Force One, his invitations to Camp David, and his wife's friendship with Laura Bush.

But the job of EPA administrator has become much less pleasant since the Democrats won control of Congress and began zeroing in on EPA's actions and on Johnson's relationship with the White House. That scrutiny is almost certain to intensify as the Bush administration attempts to deepen its imprint on environmental policy before leaving office in January. In the coming months, EPA is expected to issue some of the most controversial regulations of the Bush era -- on global warming, pollution from "factory" farms, emissions from coal-fired power plants, and industrial emissions of lead.

Johnson denies that he is a White House puppet. "Each of these decisions is my decision, my decision alone," he told National Journal in a March 28 interview. "One of the things that I've learned in my 27 years at EPA and being in a variety of decision-making capacities is that it's not a popularity contest.... I completely reject the fact that I don't listen to my staff," he said. "I spend hours upon hours with them, going through various options and understanding the implications."

Johnson's approach to his job is defended by Jeff Holmstead, who headed EPA's air-pollution and radiation program during Bush's first term. "Different administrators have very different views of their role," said Holmstead, a partner at Bracewell & Giuliani. "There are some EPA administrators who really go out of their way to represent the environmental community. And there are other EPA administrators who go out of their way to really be part of the administration." From that perspective, Johnson is the consummate team player.

Never Popular

Industry lobbyists say they are tired of hearing that the Bush EPA always sides with the business community. "You're not talking to a person who says, 'Wow, we got a break from the agency,' " said William Kovacs, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's environment, technology, and regulatory affairs division.

In the case of ozone, for example, Kovacs noted that a broad coalition of industry groups waged an aggressive -- but ultimately unsuccessful -- campaign to persuade the Bush administration not to toughen air-pollution regulations. The chamber, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and other business organizations argued that any new restriction would hurt the economies of hundreds of communities already struggling to meet federal air-pollution demands.

Kovacs insists that Bush has the right to intervene in controversial environmental debates and overrule EPA's scientific panels and staff members. "The last time I checked, the executive branch was run by the president of the United States," Kovacs said. "And it is up to him to execute the laws, not some scientist who is sitting in a windowless office and has one opinion and who wasn't elected."

Business lobbyists and environmental advocates agree that the administration has adopted several groundbreaking programs to protect the environment. Under Bush, regulators have reduced sulfur dioxide pollution from diesel-powered trucks; curbed emissions from ships, trains, and construction equipment; and imposed record fines on some of the nation's biggest polluters.

Holmstead notes that EPA is never particularly popular with business. "When I was in the EPA air office, it was hard to find a U.S. industry that we didn't regulate," he said. "What EPA does is impose very expensive regulations on the business community. Therefore, EPA is viewed with a little more skepticism perhaps than some of the other agencies." Every White House keeps a close eye on the agency for fear that its regulators will ignore the economic costs of environmental protection, Holmstead said, adding, "EPA may not be well suited to understand the overall picture, so there needs to be a counterbalance within the administration."

Bush's supporters contend that congressional Democrats' attacks on EPA are inherently political. Boxer shoots back, "To say that Democrats' criticism of the Bush EPA is just politics is ludicrous on its face, because we all breathe the same air and drink the same water and rely on the EPA to protect us from the ravages of ozone, lead, perchlorate, and other toxins."

Likewise, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says that Bush's EPA "has consistently failed to meet the needs of the American people." Famous for his searing investigations of government agencies regardless of which party is in the White House, Dingell brags, "I'm an equal-opportunity son of a bitch."

The Turnabout

Washington insiders say that the Bush White House has significantly altered the way the federal government approaches environmental protection by quietly changing the way EPA does its job. For one thing, critics charge, Bush is trying to starve the agency of cash. The White House's proposed fiscal 2009 budget would provide just $7.1 billion -- fewer actual dollars than EPA has received in any fiscal year since 1997. Bush's plan, when adjusted for inflation, includes record-low funding levels for community drinking water facilities and for the Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup program. Lawmakers from both political parties say they'll scrap the budget proposal and start from scratch.

Meanwhile, EPA lawyers and scientists say that on some key issues Johnson has directed agency staffers to come up with legal and scientific justifications for regulatory decisions that the White House has already made. That's quite a turnabout from the agency's traditional practice: EPA's professional staff would craft a proposed regulation in response to a new law or to public health problems, and the White House and the Office of Management and Budget would then vet the agency's draft rule.

And it's not just regulations that the White House is said to be taking the lead on. In December, Johnson announced he would block California from developing its own program to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from cars and trucks. Agency documents gathered by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee show that EPA staffers overwhelmingly recommended that Johnson approve California's request. Agency insiders say that the decision to deny the state a waiver originated in the White House and that Johnson subsequently ordered EPA lawyers and scientists to provide a rationale for the rejection. Congressional investigators are checking internal EPA documents to confirm that sequence of events.

Johnson "appears to have ignored the evidence before the agency and the requirements of the Clean Air Act," says Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Johnson maintains that EPA scientists and lawyers gave him a wide range of options for responding to California's request and that he made the final decision.

Current and former EPA officials also contend that the White House is telling agency staff members to focus on how much proposed regulations would cost industry, even when federal law specifically directs EPA to focus only on public health. "They've tried to achieve a paradigm shift in how EPA makes decisions," said Carol Browner, who was EPA administrator during the Clinton administration and is now with the Albright Group. "They want to shift the agency away from the historical focus on public health and environmental protection and toward requiring cost-benefit analyses."

That change, she said, could be hard for the next president to reverse. "The question is: How much have they loaded that into the under-workings of the agency, and how do you tease it back out to guarantee that the agency does its job?" said Browner, who advises Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

House Democrats say that EPA is letting industry call the shots on appointments to its advisory panels. In May 2007, chemical-industry officials protested the appointment of Deborah Rice, a Maine government toxicologist, to an EPA panel charged with reviewing a potentially harmful chemical. Industry officials said that Rice was biased because she had testified about the health hazards associated with the chemical. After receiving a letter of protest from the American Chemistry Council, the lobbying group for the nation's largest chemical manufacturers, Johnson dismissed Rice from the panel. Dingell later noted in a letter to EPA that Johnson took no action against nine scientific experts on the advisory panel who had financial ties to the American Chemistry Council or to chemical companies.

Under Johnson, EPA has been accused of limiting public access to reams of federal information on pollutants, industries, and agency research -- documents that are supposed to be available under the Freedom of Information Act. EPA has also eased requirements that companies provide data to the public about the volume of hazardous chemicals they release into the air and water in a given community.

The most devastating blow to public access came in 2006 when EPA summarily shuttered several of its libraries around the nation without first developing a plan for how vital data could be obtained by its staff and the public. According to a Government Accountability Office report, some librarians at EPA's Washington headquarters and in regional offices tossed out documents and sold office equipment at fire-sale prices in their rush to meet prescribed deadlines for closing down. EPA said that the shutdowns would save money and that much of the material would be posted online. However, the GAO noted, because of copyright restrictions, only 10 percent of EPA's data can be digitized for Internet access. In late March, EPA responded to the GAO report by promising to reopen the libraries in some fashion.

Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an alliance of state and federal employees who work on environmental issues, summed up the EPA staff's frustration over the library closures: "It took a real special talent to make library management controversial."

Creative Writing

The Bush administration also stands accused of taking an inappropriately creative and business-oriented approach to interpreting environmental laws. But, increasingly, that creativity is being slapped down by federal judges, who are ordering EPA to adhere to the letter of the law.

One of the most dramatic examples involves mercury emissions by coal-fired power plants. Under the Clean Air Act, EPA must order utilities to install cutting-edge technology to control such emissions. However, before Johnson became administrator, other Bush appointees scrapped that part of the law and instead created a cap-and-trade program allowing companies to buy and sell mercury pollution credits.

In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ridiculed the EPA's interpretation of the law, saying it "deploys the logic of the Queen of Hearts" in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. EPA and a utility-industry group are appealing.

While that legal battle drags on, the utility industry continues to emit 50 tons of mercury each year. EPA's critics contend that its controversial reinterpretation of the Clean Air Act was an underhanded way to indefinitely postpone federal controls on mercury emissions. "If the industry believes that delay is victory, they got it," former EPA Administrator Browner said. Mercury can cause severe neurological damage and is especially dangerous to young children and the fetuses of pregnant women who eat contaminated fish.

Opponents also accuse the White House of blocking federal regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions. During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate Bush pledged to control carbon dioxide and other pollutants that cause climate change. But once in office, the president reversed his position, arguing that global warming was just a theory and that such restrictions would hurt the U.S. economy. Since then, the White House has argued that EPA does not have the legal authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

However, in April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by cars and trucks if agency scientists determine that the pollutants are a danger to the public. Responding to the decision, EPA took seven months trying to pull together a regulatory program. It spent $5.3 million on contractor services and dedicated 53 EPA employees to the project, which concluded that the gases are dangerous. The agency then drafted a 300-page proposal to regulate those emissions. In early December, the documents were sent to the White House and to other federal agencies for review.

But last month, Johnson announced that EPA was starting over. He said that using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and trucks would have forced regulators to curb global-warming emissions from power plants, factories, and other businesses. Instead, he said, EPA would examine whether it could use a recently passed energy bill to address the vehicular emissions.

The reversal infuriated congressional Democrats, state officials, and environmentalists because the nation's highest court had specifically ruled on EPA's duties under the Clean Air Act. Johnson's about-face virtually guarantees that the federal government will not regulate greenhouse gases during Bush's presidency. "The Bush administration is recklessly abandoning its responsibility to address the global-warming crisis," Waxman said. Early this month, a coalition of states, cities, and environmental groups petitioned a federal court to force EPA to regulate climate-change pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

The agency's legal defeats on mercury and global warming are not isolated cases. During the past four years, the Bush administration has lost 10 lawsuits on air-pollution issues alone in the D.C. Circuit Court, which handles most challenges involving federal regulations. Holmstead, who authored the mercury rule while at EPA, insists the administration has been the victim of a liberal court. "It does seem that the court has been more willing to stretch the law if [EPA] does something that is viewed as pro-environmental versus when the environmentalists oppose it," he said.

But Lazarus, the Georgetown law professor, said that both Republican and Democratic appointees have ruled against the environmental policies of the Bush White House and EPA. "They've lost a lot of their major reforms in court, and they've lost them with balanced panels," he pointed out.

Former EPA lawyer Eric Schaeffer agreed. "These guys are losing these lawsuits on the plain language of the statute," said Schaeffer, who spent 12 years at EPA and headed the agency's regulatory enforcement office during the Clinton administration and early in the current administration. "The court is saying, 'You haven't read the law.' That's how you get conservative judges to side with the environment. You draw a circle around the statute and say, 'This was written by Congress.' " Schaeffer now runs the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group.

In the absence of federal regulations on mercury, global warming, and other pollution problems, the states are increasingly developing their own curbs, noted Becker of the air regulators group: "By not taking strong action in a lot of these areas, the agency is inviting the states to act. And, by golly, they have."

Now, industry officials have begun complaining that the states are creating a patchwork of regulatory programs and that a uniform federal standard would be easier to meet.

Closing Time

As Bush's presidency winds down, EPA is drawing up a long list of new environmental policies. "As the president said, he's sprinting to the finish line. And I, too, am sprinting to the finish line," Johnson said.

His critics are bracing for the worst. "The administration is going to be pushing out some very obnoxious stuff," predicts John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's clean-air program. "They've got their agenda all lined up. And they want to accomplish as much as they can before they leave office."

Some of the administration's environmental proposals -- the president's EPA budget, for example -- can be ignored by Congress. Others will no doubt be challenged in court. But quite a few actions will be difficult to reverse -- even under a new, more environmentally friendly administration. "Realistically, it would take half of an administration to overturn the damage they've done through rule-making," Walke said. "And that's if you start immediately and succeed at overturning everything that was harmful from the past eight years. That's probably not likely. It's daunting at best."

As Becker sees it, "Under any new administration, including a McCain administration, they need to come in from the get-go and turn the page. They need to move on. People at EPA will feel relieved." Browner said she would counsel the next EPA administrator to take a firm stand on key environmental issues. She recalled the advice she received from the agency's first head: "Ruckelshaus told me, 'If you're not prepared on occasion to use your position and power to go directly to the president and ask him to support a decision you're making, you shouldn't take the job.' "

In the meantime, disgruntled EPA professionals are longing for the day when the next administration takes over their agency. "It's not a Republican-versus-Democrat issue," said union representative Hirzy. "It's just that in the last eight years we've had a reactionary operation here that has just been murderous. 01/20/09 -- that's the magic number."

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NASA veteran a key player in global warming debate

Margaret Kriz and Gregg Sangillo — Fri, 28 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

On one of those visits, Hansen took part in a polite debate with Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Richard Lindzen, who questions the scientific underpinnings of climate change. Hansen is convinced that global warming is real and that the consequences are potentially disastrous.

"Among well-qualified scientists who have analyzed the data in detail, there is now a reasonable consensus that humans are a primary cause of the warming," he said, while warning that the Earth's "atmospheric composition is changing before our eyes."

Hansen is best-known on the Washington political scene for sounding the alarm about global warming during the 1980s, when he and his NASA colleagues gave high-profile testimony before Congress. Those presentations helped build political and scientific momentum for U.S. approval of the 1992 United Nations framework convention on climate change. Under that agreement, President George H.W. Bush pledged to stabilize U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, although the accord included no deadlines.

Since then, many other pre-eminent scientists have expanded the scientific understanding of global warming. But Hansen's research continues to carry significant weight in scientific circles.

Last December, he co-authored a study boosting the argument that black carbon -- or soot from cars, coal-fired power plants, and wildfires -- may be affecting the way the sun reflects off snow and thus accounting for a quarter of all global warming. Hansen's March 2004 article in Scientific American warned that carbon dioxide emissions and soot are speeding up global warming, which, he wrote, "is having noticeable impacts as glaciers are retreating worldwide, Arctic sea ice has thinned, and spring comes about one week earlier than when I grew up in the 1950s."

Hansen, 63, spent his formative years in Denison, Iowa, which, he proudly relates, was the hometown of the late actress Donna Reed. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa and did his graduate studies at the Universities of Kyoto and Tokyo and at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

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Bush not doing enough to protect chemical plants, critics contend

Margaret Kriz — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In a Rose Garden ceremony in July 2002, President Bush unveiled his strategy for preventing terrorist attacks on American soil. Flanked by key lawmakers from both major parties, he announced plans to create a Department of Homeland Security and released a report identifying the federal agencies designated to protect particularly vulnerable industries. The Environmental Protection Agency's assignments included safeguarding the chemical industry and its hazardous materials.

"All of us agree," the president declared at the time, "that protecting Americans from attack is our most urgent national priority, and that we must act on that priority."

Then, in February of this year, his administration specifically warned that terrorists "may attempt to launch conventional attacks against the U.S. nuclear/chemical industrial infrastructure to cause contamination, disruption, and terror. Based on information, nuclear power plants and industrial chemical plants remain viable targets."

But despite the Bush administration's public promises and alarms, the White House has taken almost no action to improve security at any of the nation's 15,000 facilities-including chemical manufacturing plants, petroleum tank farms, and pesticide companies-that contain large quantities of potentially deadly chemicals. For that matter, the administration has done virtually nothing even to assess those facilities' vulnerability, even though the dangers are far from theoretical: An accidental leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, immediately killed between 3,800 and 8,000 people in 1984 and, according to some reports, has since claimed an additional 12,000 lives. Closer to home, an accidental chlorine gas leak at a Honeywell refrigeration plant in Baton Rouge, La., on July 20 sent four workers to the hospital and forced 600 residents to stay indoors.

Counterterrorism experts shudder to think about the number of deaths an intentional release of a toxic chemical could cause. And the Bush administration's inertia heightens their worries.

"These chemical plants have a vulnerability which has a catastrophic characteristic ... that could approximate the World Trade Center," Rand Beers, a White House counterterrorism adviser for 30 years, told National Journal. Dissatisfied with the Bush administration's approach to security, Beers resigned in March and now advises the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

Even though the EPA is the only federal regulatory agency with expertise in chemical safety, early this year the White House shifted responsibility for the chemical industry to the Homeland Security Department. That transfer followed industry complaints that the EPA, which was attempting to toughen federal security requirements, had become too demanding. Still struggling to get on its feet, Homeland Security has no authority to require the chemical industry to adopt stricter security measures. It also doesn't have the money or personnel to inspect industrial plants for potential security problems.

Thus, the Bush administration is relying solely on voluntary safety programs developed by chemical-industry trade associations. But even if every member of those associations faithfully abided by the voluntary guidelines, two-thirds of the facilities that use or store high volumes of toxic chemicals would still be unaccounted for because they don't belong to those groups, according to EPA officials.

The industry's voluntary efforts do not satisfy Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who along with then-EPA Administrator Christie Whitman declared in an October 2002 letter to The Washington Post that "voluntary efforts alone are not sufficient to provide the level of assurance Americans deserve." In a February 2003 letter to the General Accounting Office, the Justice Department warned, "The risk of terrorists' attempting in the foreseeable future to cause an industrial chemical release is both real and credible."

But the administration has given only half-hearted support to legislative efforts to force the industry to make itself less vulnerable. Since shortly after 9/11, Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., whose state is dotted with facilities that use or manufacture vast quantities of hazardous chemicals, has been pushing legislation to require such companies to assess and improve their security. Corzine's bill would also mandate that companies consider using safer alternatives to their current practices for manufacturing and storing chemicals.

During the previous Congress, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously voted for the Corzine measure. But the proposal died on the Senate floor after the chemical industry fought hard to block it.

This year, the panel's new chairman, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., is offering a less stringent chemical-industry security bill, which he wrote with the help of the Bush administration. The White House, however, has invested no political capital in getting it passed, and the bill has languished. Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over toxic chemicals, contends that new regulations aren't needed. "I don't see a burning need to legislate," Barton said in an interview. He stresses the difficulty of defending industrial plants against terrorism and the slim chance that any particular facility would end up being a terrorist target.

Calling Off the Watchdogs

Two weeks after 9/11, Whitman met with leaders of the chemical industry for a frank discussion about their industry's vulnerability to terrorist attacks. EPA regulators already had some idea of the scope of the problem. Under the Clean Air Act, every company that uses or stores extremely hazardous chemicals is required to file an annual report explaining the steps it's taking to prevent accidental releases of toxic chemicals and to protect the environment and nearby residents if a release does occur.

Based on reports from the 15,000 facilities required to submit that worst-case-scenario information, the EPA warned that a terrorist attack on any one of the 123 chemical facilities located in densely populated areas could expose 1 million people to toxic chemicals. An attack on one of 700 other facilities could threaten at least 100,000 people. And an attack at one of 3,000 other chemical sites could affect 10,000 people.

In the months after Whitman's meeting, the EPA began developing guidelines for companies to assess their vulnerability to terrorism. Agency officials also seriously considered issuing new regulations to require the owners of all 15,000 of its "worst-case" sites to evaluate and improve security. Regulators planned to issue those rules under a provision of the Clean Air Act that authorizes the agency to control accidental chemical releases. Ultimately, though, the EPA feared that the chemical industry would sue and decided not to stretch the Clean Air Act to cover potential terrorist attacks. The EPA opted instead to go the legislative route and ask for more authority to mandate that the chemical plants better protect themselves.

EPA officials spent nearly a year working on a legislative proposal with the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and various federal agencies. The major sticking point was whether the legislation should require companies to consider using safer chemicals and technologies.

"EPA initially said that one of the things facilities ought to at least look at as part of a comprehensive vulnerability assessment is whether there are steps they can take to reduce the hazards that are present at the site," recalls a former EPA official who was involved in the debate. "If they're storing a six-month supply of a hazardous chemical, would they be less vulnerable to attack if they only kept a one-month supply on site? If they were using a highly toxic chemical, is there a less toxic replacement?"

Industry lobbyists forcefully fought the idea of a law requiring companies to consider safer alternatives. "It creates too big a door for federal micromanagement of the decisions that facility operators are making on a day-to-day level," said Rob McArver, director of government relations at the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing 300 fairly small companies.

"Chemical companies make dangerous things," added Greg Lebedev, president of the American Chemistry Council, which represents 180 giants of the chemical manufacturing industry. "Getting into the technology of what you make and how you make it is a subject for an environmental or technology context, not security. I don't want us to wander down an exotic path here."

In late 2002, the EPA further enraged industry by announcing plans to inspect the chemical plants it considered most vulnerable to an attack. The agency asked more than 30 companies to voluntarily allow EPA inspectors to tour their sites. At least two refused. The inspections that were undertaken, EPA officials say, found that safeguards varied widely. Some companies were aggressively improving security; others were doing nothing.

The EPA's attempts to lay the groundwork for an aggressive security program proved to be its undoing. In early 2003, the White House responded to industry protests by pulling the EPA off the chemical site security beat. The administration quietly shifted oversight to Homeland Security. Since then, industry officials and administration sources say, the federal government has done little to gauge the security at chemical plants.

The only concerted action on chemical plant safety is coming from the industry's trade associations. The American Chemistry Council has been widely praised for a voluntary program in which it asks members to assess and upgrade security and to hire an independent auditor to judge their success. Complying with the council's plan is now a prerequisite for membership in the group and in the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association. The American Petroleum Institute and several other trade associations have endorsed the approach, but aren't requiring members to follow it.

Despite the laurels the American Chemistry Council program won, industry association officials say more needs to be done- even if not by their members. "We have a bit of a vacuum," Lebedev says. "The EPA doesn't do anything because that's not what they do. DHS is still pulling itself together from all sides of Washington just to make itself into a reasonably homogeneous agency. No doubt it isn't doing very much there." Lebedev said his group now supports legislation to give Homeland Security the power to require chemical companies to conduct vulnerability assessments and improve their security. But he wants Congress to essentially exempt companies that have adopted the American Chemistry Council's plan.

Oil industry officials argue that most petroleum companies don't need-and haven't waited for-a federal mandate to guard against terrorism. "There is no government agency now that can go in and order people to do these assessments," said American Petroleum Industry spokesman Michael Shanahan. "But it's in the self-interest of industry to protect itself."

Perhaps so. Several recent reports, however, raise questions about how aggressively corporate America is responding to the threat of another major terrorist attack. A July 9 survey by the Conference Board, a New York City-based business research group, found that since 9/11, U.S. companies have increased their spending on security an average of only 4 percent. Other studies by the Brookings Institution, Rand, the Congressional Research Service, and the Progressive Policy Institute also raised serious questions about security problems at chemical plants and other high-risk facilities with large amounts of hazardous material.

Environmentalists are suspicious of the chemical industry's assurances that its facilities are doing enough. They cite dozens of instances in which news reporters or activists were able to walk into a chemical plant site or oil refinery without being stopped by a guard or barrier.

"We won't have a complete picture of the safety at these facilities until the DHS has the resources and inclination to require all facilities to submit their security plans and then analyzes those plans," said Jon Devine of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Rick Hind, legislative director of Greenpeace's toxics campaign, belittles the American Chemistry Council program as "PR eyewash." The chemical industry's promises, he said, are "lulling the Bush administration into complacency or overconfidence. So while the world seems to be gaining in reasons to hate us, we seem to be ignoring an entire sector of our infrastructure that sticks out like a sore thumb to terrorists."

On July 23, Corzine offered an amendment to the Homeland Security appropriations bill that would have provided $80 million for the department to assess the security at chemical facilities nationwide. The amendment was tabled on the Senate floor.

Soft Spots?

Corzine says he is frustrated that Congress has balked at ensuring the safety of plants that use and store vast quantities of potentially lethal chemicals. "It strikes me," he said in an interview, "that there is just no willingness to move here. Almost two years after September 11, it's hard to believe that if we're committed to homeland security, we have not addressed something that everybody recognizes is among the top threats." Corzine said he's looking for "every possible avenue" for getting his proposal written into law. For example, he might offer it as an amendment to the Senate energy bill, which is now on the Senate floor.

Last year, industry lobbyists blocked Corzine's bill after they rallied trade groups-ranging from the Chlorine Chemistry Council to the Agricultural Retailers Association-to fight the measure as unnecessary government interference. Corzine describes that defeat and industry's continuing effort to water down his bill as "a classic case of the special interests trumping the public interest."

Early this year, Corzine reintroduced his bill with Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Meanwhile, Chairman Inhofe drew up his own chemical-security legislation with input from the administration. In May, Inhofe announced plans to mark up his measure. But he didn't have the committee votes to pass his version, which critics say wouldn't go far enough to protect chemical facilities sites. Inhofe's bill would not require companies to submit vulnerability or sercurity-improvement plans to Homeland Security. It also would not require companies to consider using alternatives to current chemicals and practices.

After a short, unsuccessful flurry of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, Inhofe's version was shoved onto a back burner until the committee completes work on the transportation reauthorization bill, which is considered a top priority because it will bring political pork to lawmakers' financially strapped home states. The White House is pushing Inhofe to take up its proposed rewrite of the Clean Air Act immediately after Congress's summer recess. If the chairman agrees, action on his chemical security measure could be delayed yet again.

Meanwhile, Corzine's bill has gone through several iterations since he introduced it. His first proposal would have put the EPA in charge of chemical-plant security. Inhofe strongly objected to that provision, arguing that the agency is "notorious" for failing to keep the chemical industry's secrets.

"The whole idea is security," Inhofe said in an interview. "And we can cite a lot of examples where people inside EPA leaked information. Ultimately, it could fall into the hands of the wrong people."

Corzine's current version would give Homeland Security responsibility for the chemical-security program. But the battle continues over Corzine's desire to encourage industry to use inherently safer technology at the chemical facilities. Inhofe and industry lobbyists strongly oppose that approach.

Corzine sees that mandate as critical. "I'm staying with it," he said in an interview. But he added, "You know, at some point I'd just like to see fences put up and be certain that they're being monitored. I'd like to make sure that chemical facilities on waterfronts have some control over access from the water.

"If you take a boat ride up Arthur Kill, between New York and New Jersey, you'd be shocked at how little security there is on the water side of those plants. It strikes me as absolutely an abject failure to address one of the serious soft spots in our communities."

Republicans, however, tend to be inclined to give the chemical industry the benefit of the doubt on security issues. Several current and former Bush administration staffers said that the White House simply isn't interested in creating a massive program for inspecting chemical plants. And Texas Republican Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality, said that although he's monitoring the situation, he sees no need for tough new chemical security requirements in the aftermath of 9/11.

"The problem you have in an open society is that it's physically impossible to make any large industrial site terrorist-proof," Barton said in an interview. "If there are enough terrorists who are dedicated enough and equipped well enough, they're going to overwhelm everything that you put up short of some sort of Fort Knox-which doesn't make much sense, given the cost and the relatively remote possibility that any specific site is going to be targeted."

Security experts counter that while it might be unlikely that any particular chemical facility will be attacked, it is not unrealistic to think that some chemical facility will be targeted. At a June summit on chemical-industry security, FBI special agent Troy Morgan, a specialist on weapons of mass destruction, warned that chemical tank farms risk being turned into a "poor man's atomic bomb."

"You've heard about sarin and other chemical weapons in the news," Morgan was quoted as saying in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "But it's far easier to attack a railcar full of toxic industrial chemicals than it is to compromise the security of a military base and obtain these materials."

Former White House counterterrorism adviser Beers contends that the Bush administration ought to enhance security at chemical plants. "There are so many possible vulnerabilities that to some degree it's a very difficult task to try to sort among them all," he said. But he suggested that government mandates would level the playing field between companies that are investing in security and those that are gaining a competitive edge by not spending the money. "This is one problem they can do something about," he said. "Why isn't it being done?"

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Forest Service to fight fires with logging, aggressive management

Margaret Kriz — Fri, 26 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Last summer, in the weeks before President Bush nominated him to oversee the U.S. Forest Service, Mark E. Rey spent his spare time devouring books on the history of the nation's forests. One tome that he later recommended to others was Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910, Stephen Pyne's detailed account of the horrific blazes that killed 83 people and incinerated 3 million acres of Western forest in just two days.

This summer, the drought-parched West is once again being devastated by wildfires, which some forestry experts are comparing to the 1910 conflagrations. So far this year, fires have burned 3.2 million acres. At the moment, battling the blazing is costing taxpayers $3.7 million a day. If this year's pace continues, the damage will surpass the fire season of 2000-the worst in 50 years-when blazes charred 8.4 million acres and cost more than $1 billion to fight.

Now Rey isn't just reading about fires. As undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the Agriculture Department, Rey has authority over the Forest Service and is coordinating the federal agencies' response to this year's fires.

And he is intent on changing federal land-use policies that he charges are a prime cause of the severity of today's fire problem. Rey argues that the forests should be more aggressively managed to reduce the amount of combustible material available to feed a fire once it breaks out. That means thinning forests that are unnaturally dense, removing trees that are dead or dying. He also supports what he calls "sustainable" logging.

Meanwhile, some supporters of the timber industry are blaming today's wildfires on anti-logging policies successfully pushed by environmentalists. Green activists counter by accusing Rey and the lumber industry of using the fires as an excuse to open up more federal land to logging.

The argument puts Rey, 49, in the middle of a political and philosophical standoff guaranteed to slow any government attempt to reduce the likelihood of devastating wildfires in the national forests. So, Rey is trying to damp down the heated debate.

"It's not very helpful to blame the environmentalists for these fires," he says. "It's equally unhelpful for the environmentalists to be skeptical or suspicious."

However, his industry background makes him difficult for environmentalists to accept as the conflict's mediator. Before being appointed to his current job, Rey had spent 18 years as a timber-industry lobbyist and later worked as legislative director of the forests subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. There, he worked closely with conservative Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, who is now the panel's ranking Republican. In the past, Rey often locked horns with environmentalists, and the greens remain dubious about his motives.

Environmental activists say they've learned to be very cautious when dealing with the soft-spoken Rey. "I've always considered Mark to be a very intelligent and very good political strategist," says Michael Francis, a forest policy expert with the Wilderness Society. "He understands the strengths that he has, both in the job and in today's political situation. And he's exploiting them to further the interests of logging and other development activities in the national forests, at the expense of conservation," Francis adds. "In his vocabulary, I think `conservation' is a four-letter word."

Craig, who urged Vice President Cheney to press for Rey's appointment, disagrees, maintaining that his former aide is "the right man in the right place at the right time" to handle today's forest fire problems. "He knows the forests better than anyone I've ever met," Craig says. The senator asserts that Rey will restore balance to Forest Service policies after eight years of Clinton administration policies that, Craig charges, went too far in passively preserving rather than actively managing forests.

While they differ on many things, all sides in the contentious debate agree that the government policy adopted in response to the 1910 fires produced the tinderbox in which today's fires are igniting. The government began extinguishing all natural and man-made forest fires, rather than permitting low-intensity fires to clear the undergrowth and debris from forest floors. Modern scientists who study forestry say the government was tragically misguided in trying to stamp out all forest fires. Without fire's cleansing effects, the nation's forests became unnaturally and dangerously overgrown and choked with underbrush. These conditions, combined with an extended drought, make the woodlands vulnerable to intense wildfires that burn hot enough to consume entire forests and everything else in their paths.

Rey says that the solution is to aggressively manage the forestlands by thinning the dense regions of timber through logging and by using safe, prescribed burns to eliminate the undergrowth. His aim is to return the forests to their pre-1910 condition.

"We need to reduce the fuel loads on these stands of forest as quickly as we can, so that we can get back to a time when natural fires, lower-intensity fires, moved through the stands," he says. "That has to be our top priority."

Rey estimates that a whopping 80 million acres of federal forests are in need of more-active management.

Environmentalists agree that some forest thinning is needed, especially where the forests bump up against outer suburbia. (In forestry jargon, that's the "wildland-urban interface.") But the greens charge that Rey wants a kind of logging far more intensive than the word "thinning" might suggest.

At the crux of the forest-control controversy is the question of how "management" should be defined. Rey and timber-industry officials argue that to accomplish the colossal job of improving conditions in the national forests, government should allow the harvesting of some commercially valuable large trees to give loggers an incentive to do the less-profitable work of "thinning" the forests. According to Rey, "If we're going to be able to do this in anything less than 40 years, we're going to have to find ways to encourage investment by partners who will help defray the costs" of thinning.

Yet environmentalists contend that Rey's real goal is to give state officials and local forest managers far greater authority to ignore federal environmental laws and to expand logging into wilderness areas that are now off-limits. "Public support for protecting the national forests from logging is so strong that [Bush administration officials] have to find other ways to get their logging done," argues Sean Cosgrove, national forest policy specialist at the Sierra Club. "So they'd like to blur the lines of what is active management and [what is] reasonable accounting for a timber-sale program."

Attempts to ease the traditional tensions between the logging industry and the environmental community were dealt a serious setback in May when Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and two Western governors-Republicans Jane Dee Hull of Arizona and Judy Martz of Montana-claimed that environmentalists were to blame for recent wildfires because they had gone to court to block the federal government's proposed thinning projects.

Environmentalists countered that they file far fewer legal challenges than the conservatives allege and that they file their lawsuits only when government officials fail to follow federal laws. "Most of the time, the reason why we litigate is because they're breaking the laws or want to log old-growth forests or destroy fish and wildlife habitat," Cosgrove says. "That's when we try to hold them accountable."

Environmentalists argue that the Bush administration is launching a broad campaign to increase logging in the national forests. They cite as evidence a recent draft report that says the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are considering proposals to "maximize" logging in the Pacific Northwest, partly by cutting more timber in old-growth forests. That document, first reported in the Portland Oregonian, outlines a three-year plan to boost timber harvests while easing environmental protection laws.

Forest Service officials said that the draft report, written by agency staffers in Portland, remains a work in progress and that no final decisions have been made. Rey said that the aim of the report is to comply with the expanded logging goals envisioned, but never acted upon, by the Clinton administration under its 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. That plan sought to end the legal wrangling between environmentalists and timber companies over logging in the Pacific Northwest.

Naturally, timber-industry officials support Rey's proposals to allow more-active management of federal forests and to expand logging. They welcomed his appointment as a break with the Clinton era, when the administration sought to prevent road-building and logging on 58.5 million acres of roadless Forest Service lands.

During the Clinton administration, "we saw decisions on individual logging projects being made within the White House," says Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a Portland-based timber-industry group. "We support the Bush administration's efforts to turn the management of these national resources over to the professionals, the ones that live and work with these resources day in and day out." Several industry groups and states have filed suit to overturn Clinton's "roadless" policy. And Rey has already begun to rewrite the regulation.

But while loggers praise the Bush administration's policy shift, some industry officials argue that Rey's hands will be tied by such environmental laws as the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Former Rep. W. Henson Moore, R-La., who now heads the American Forest & Paper Association, says that national forest policy needs changes far more fundamental than any Rey can make. "We have a court system that favors the environmentalists filing lawsuits. I think that Mark Rey understands this as well as anyone, but I don't think he can do a lot about it administratively," Moore said. "You have to get to the bottom of the laws that allow these challenges to happen. And I don't see this administration going to Congress with any kind of changes."

In the middle of this hot, dry summer, Rey's most pressing job is to provide the funding and political backup needed by the nearly 12,000 firefighters struggling to contain the huge blazes ravaging the West. Rey resists comparisons between today's fires and the devastating 1910 blazes. Even if this year's fire season continues at its current rapacious pace, he says, "I don't think at the end of the day we'll have ... the number of acres lost, because we have far better firefighting capacity than we did in 1910."

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Three departments offer important lessons on reorganization

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Margaret Kriz, and Corine Hegland — Fri, 14 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Creating a Department of Homeland Security will demand the biggest reorganization of government in 50 years. But those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and in Washington, there is an awful lot of history that no one would want to repeat. The last three Cabinet departments to be cobbled together from scattered components-Defense, Transportation, and Energy-all offer important, if often painful, lessons for today.

Defense: The 40 Years' War

Hunting for a historical analogy for the creation of the sprawling Homeland Security Department? It's clear which date the Bush team wants you to pick: 1947. That year saw the origin of the Defense Department (and the National Security Council and the CIA). White House spokesman Ari Fleischer invoked 1947 three times in briefing reporters on President Bush's new plan. And Condoleezza Rice, speaking during the 2000 presidential campaign, long before she became national security adviser, actually told National Journal to expect Bush to make the biggest government reforms since 1947. But just what do administration officials mean by harking back to the 1947 model? And what awkward aspects of history would they like us to ignore?

On the surface, the National Security Act of 1947 was a "big-bang" reorganization, much like Bush's plan: A stroke of President Truman's pen put the rival Army, Navy, and Air Force under a single civilian secretary, a unified chain of command, and an interservice Joint Staff. And like the proposed Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense was a reaction to a devastating surprise attack: Japan's raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941, during which the separate Army and Navy headquarters failed to coordinate a defense.

But the 1947 reorganization did not fix the lack of coordination. Political scientist Amy Zegart (who studied under Rice at Stanford University) went so far as to title her history of the National Security Act and its aftermath Flawed by Design. The rival bureaucracies fought the reform so successfully, both within the administration and on the Hill, that the final structure of the department was a compromise: The military services still submitted separate budgets to Congress, the Joint Staff became a graveyard for officers' careers, and the "unified commanders" could not actually order unified action. As late as 1983, during the invasion of Grenada, the Army and Marine Corps simply split the island down the middle. Their separate, ill-coordinated campaigns against a Third World enemy that they outnumbered 10-to-1 took three days and cost 18 American lives.

Ironically, it was America's first losses to radical Islam that inspired a reform of the 1947 reform. In 1980, an interservice attempt to rescue U.S. hostages from fundamentalists in Iran ended in a deadly fireball at a place called Desert One, where a Marine helicopter collided with an Air Force plane loaded with Army commandos. Eight men died. Congress was outraged. But three years later, legislation to fix the problem had run aground. What restarted the push for reform was the deaths of 241 Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1983, in the first massive suicide bombing by Muslim extremists against Americans. Two of the wounded servicemen went into cardiac arrest while Navy and Air Force medics bickered over who would treat them. A subsequent investigation showed that the military's complex, multiservice chain of command had failed to recognize and defend against the terrorist threat. Nevertheless, it still took the Grenada disaster and three more years for Congress to pass the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the next major overhaul of the Defense Department-and it passed over the Reagan administration's objections.

Unlike the 1947 act, the 1986 reform went beyond organizational restructuring and changed some important career incentives. Explained Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye: "One of the reasons Goldwater-Nichols worked was that any officer who wanted to rise in his own service had to have a `purple' assignment, a joint assignment"-a requirement that forced the future leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines to learn to work together if they wanted to be promoted.

So what is the true lesson of history here? The 1947 act was not a total failure: Flawed as it was, it did lay the structural foundation of a better organization. But it took 39 years, and many deaths, to finish the job.

Transportation: A Long, Strange Trip

The Department of Transportation was born on April Fool's Day, 1967-just 13 months after President Johnson started knocking congressional heads together to get it done. With 30-odd component agencies and 95,000 employees, Transportation was the most ambitious consolidation of federal functions between the 1947 Defense Department merger and Bush's proposal for a Homeland Security Department. Thirty-five years later, Transportation still struggles to make its components cooperate, share information, and generally play nice-but it has come a long, long way.

Jack Basso lived through almost all of Transportation's evolution: He started in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Public Roads, which was shunted into the new department on day one, and he retired in 2001 as Transportation's assistant secretary for the budget. Now at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, Basso greeted the announcement of the proposed Homeland Security Department with a jaundiced eye. "I was thinking, `Man, are they in for an interesting time,'" he laughed. "With the stroke of a pen, you legally create a structure. Making it into a [real] structure takes years."

The Transportation Department's early days were roiled by power struggles between the secretary and his subordinates, to whom Congress had directly delegated some key authorities. An effort to consolidate all of the department's inspections and audits into a single office, for example, took six months, during which the secretary issued orders and the agency heads invoked their independent powers to ignore them. The bickering extended to the trivial: The headstrong Federal Aviation Administration-which had pushed for the reorganization in the first place-for years refused to fly the new departmental flag in front of its (separate) headquarters building.

Today, the flag is flying, but the battle over power drags on. Congress's decision to give the subordinate administrators their own legal structures meant that individual modes of transportation could and did prosper without bureaucratic interference from above. But it also gave the secretary few levers to make the component agencies cooperate, let alone to restructure them in the interest of efficiency. More than one Transportation secretary has left office with battle scars from trying to meld, say, highways and mass transit into one coherent office for land-based transportation, or to consolidate different safety offices into a single agency. Today, with multiple congressional committees retaining their pre-1967 ties to individual agencies, getting approval for any department-wide change is still a nightmare.

But the main lesson of Transportation, Basso said, is to plan carefully at the inception-and then get on with business: "If you're going to make changes, get them over with," he said, "and let people settle in and get back to doing their jobs."

Energy: Criticized Mass

The history of the Department of Energy reinforces the lesson that legislating a bureaucracy into existence is just the beginning of the battle. Created in 1977 after OPEC oil embargoes had racked the U.S. economy, the Energy Department faced little opposition during its legislative birth in Congress. But in the decades since, with scandals over stolen nuclear secrets and missing hard drives, Energy has taken flak, including some from its own officials, as one of the most dysfunctional bodies in government.

President Carter proposed the new department in 1977, drawing on a similar plan floated unsuccessfully by President Ford. Congress took only five months to approve Carter's blueprint. In a key contrast to today's divided government, however, one party then had control of both Congress and the White House. "Part of it was the fact that you had a Democratic Congress, and you had a new [Democratic] president who made this a high agenda item," recalled former Rep. Phillip Sharp, D-Ind., who sat on the Select Committee on Energy that was formed to consider Carter's proposal.

The core of the new Cabinet department was the Energy Research and Development Administration, itself an evolution of the Atomic Energy Commission, which focused on federal energy research. Energy also brought together the Federal Power Commission, the Federal Energy Administration, and bits and pieces of five other federal agencies.

In a model that Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer explicitly likened to the current role of Tom Ridge, Carter's special assistant on energy, James Schlesinger, devised the new department, lobbied for it on the Hill, and then was confirmed as its first secretary. In his new job, Schlesinger had authority over nuclear weapons production, the prestigious national nuclear research laboratories, and even regulation of oil and natural gas prices (a power later abolished). But if getting the legislation passed had proved easy, actually creating a new department out of such diverse parts proved to be surprisingly difficult. "The problem," Schlesinger said, "is to bring together the various rather sharply divergent cultures after-after-the creation of the department. And one has to choose ... a dominant culture and the budgetary processes, the organizational processes, for the new department. And the disparate units that are brought together in the department will have to adjust to that dominant culture."

In the case of Energy, that adjustment wasn't easy. "You have no idea how aggravated workers became when they were asked to move from their old offices to Energy headquarters at 1000 Independence [Ave.]," said lobbyist Andrew L. Zausner, who in 1977 was a top aide to Deputy Energy Secretary John O'Leary. "It took unbelievable negotiations over months to get people to move."

Many of the staff members who finally did move over to headquarters were employees their parent agencies were glad to see go. "Who gets passed off isn't necessarily the best and brightest," one former Republican Energy official said. "I've always felt that Energy was thin in terms of really high-quality people."

As a result, Zausner said, "for a period of time, the new Cabinet department in reality worked less well than the original parts." He added, "When you create a new agency, you take two steps back before you can take three steps forward."

Some Energy-watchers argue that it was more like two steps forward and three back-in large part because Congress never changed its committee structure to align with the new department. "With each assistant secretary reporting to a separate subcommittee on the Hill, you're going to wind up with the assistant secretaries working for subcommittee chairmen rather than for the Cabinet secretary," said nuclear expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "You've seen this for the last quarter of a century with the Energy Department ... which has always had difficulty achieving institutional coherence."

But one crucial difference between 1977 and today gives cause for optimism, said former Rep. Sharp: As bad as the oil embargoes were, today's national security crisis is far more compelling. "This is significantly different than when Energy was created," Sharp said. "Today there is a deeper recognition that there are serious problems that have to be solved."

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Agencies pull sensitive information from Web sites

Margaret Kriz — Fri, 19 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

To the consternation of watchdog groups and many journalists, government agencies have been quietly deleting detailed descriptions of, among other things, U.S. fuel pipelines, nuclear reactors, chemical plants, and defense operations.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they received no White House directive to pull information off their Web sites.

"This is something we're doing on our own," said NRC spokesman Victor Dricks. In fact, the deletions appear to be happening in an ad hoc, sometimes contradictory, manner.

Twenty-one journalism organizations, including the Society of Professional Journalists, the Poynter Institute, and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, criticized the government's sweeping, unannounced actions. The journalism groups asserted in a statement released on October 13 that "these restrictions pose dangers to American democracy and prevent American citizens from obtaining the information they need."

Quite a few public interest, First Amendment rights, library, and environmental groups are also voicing concern about the deletions and are closely monitoring government Web sites, according to Gary Bass, the head of OMB Watch, a Washington-based government watchdog group.

"At a time when it's understandable that everyone's on pins and needles, our [government's] initial response may be to overreact" by withdrawing too much information, Bass said. "We need to come up with a rational plan for this."

Among the most controversial deletions involve data on potentially dangerous chemicals stored at 15,000 company sites around the nation. Those chemical reports, which had been posted on the EPA's Web site, included companies' detailed emergency plans for evacuating the regions around the chemical plants in the event of an accident.

EPA officials removed that information from the Web site shortly after the September 11 attacks. However, summaries of the risk-management plans for chemical accidents are still available on OMB Watch's Web site.

Bass argues that people have a right to know about the potential dangers in their neighborhoods. "If I were the parent of kids going to a child care center near a chemical plant, I'd sure as heck want to know that my kids were in a dangerous area," he said. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, chemical industry officials-citing concerns about terrorism and competition-had sought to limit the public's ability to review the EPA's risk-management information.

OMB Watch's decision to continue offering the risk-management data on its Web site has put Bass at odds with chemical industry groups. It has also attracted hate mail and irate phone calls from people who accuse him of playing into the hands of terrorists.

OMB Watch was singled out for criticism in a recent National Review column by Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University. Adler argued that the United States' "enemies will not attack us with tanks and fighter planes. Rather, as on September 11, they will identify our vulnerabilities and turn the fruits of modern industrial civilization against us.... We should not support federal agencies or environmental activist groups exposing our Achilles's heels."

Meanwhile, some news organizations have turned up other sensitive information available on nongovernment Web sites, including details about the secure bunkers available for use by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. On Tuesday, ABC News reported that the locations and layouts of those military command centers, as well as descriptions of the centers' water supplies, are readily accessible at the click of a mouse. Federal officials promptly condemned the public posting of such government secrets.

Among federal agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken the most dramatic action to restrict access to information it had previously made public. On October 11, the NRC took an unprecedented step, which it explained in a statement that was all that remained of its once extensive Web site: "Our site is not operational at this time. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken the action to shut down its Web site. In support of our mission to protect public health and safety, we are performing a review of all material on our site. We appreciate your patience and understanding during these difficult times."

According to a letter from Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., to NRC Chairman Richard Meserve, NRC officials told Markey's staff that NRC's site was closed at the request of "a military officer who alleges that there was classified information on the site."

Even before taking its Web site down, the NRC had withdrawn a map of the nation's 103 active commercial nuclear reactors. Inexplicably, however, the site had continued to provide the names and addresses of those facilities. And regional maps of the reactor sites continued to be available on the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Web site.

Other data deleted from government sites included maps of natural gas and oil pipelines, maps of waterways and bridges, and information on hydroelectric dams. The Federal Aviation Administration's Web site has stopped providing details about its enforcement actions and the records of airplane accidents.

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EPA stuck with backlog of environmental justice decisions

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 30 Jul 2001 00:00:00 -0400

This year, however, with a Republican in the White House and EPA Administrator Christie Whitman ranking environmental justice as a top priority, Knollenberg abandoned his rider for the agency's fiscal 2002 budget. At the same time, House Republicans are giving Whitman more money to handle civil rights complaints. At a July 10 appropriations markup, the panel provided $11.9 million for the agency's environmental justice efforts, an increase of $2.7 million above fiscal 2001.

The congressional change of heart apparently is designed to help Whitman clear up the backlog of civil rights complaints she inherited when she took the reins of the agency early this year. Those petitions, many of which charge state or local government agencies with unjustly allowing new smoke-belching factories to be built in already-polluted neighborhoods, were filed under an EPA program that empowers the agency as a civil rights watchdog over government offices and private contractors that receive federal money. Whitman is creating a 15-person taskforce to tackle the 66 environmental justice petitions now pending before the agency. At a recent Hill hearing, she promised to clear up that backlog by 2003.

The EPA is placing renewed emphasis on environmental justice cases at a time when green civil rights issues are heating up on several fronts, including a potentially precedent-setting court case that questions decisions made by New Jersey state environmental regulators during Whitman's term as governor:

In April, the Supreme Court issued a controversial and potentially far-reaching civil rights decision that prevents private citizens from using Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to legally challenge state and local environmental agencies whose policies inadvertently have discriminatory results.
In May, a federal district court ruled that New Jersey state environmental regulators violated the civil rights of Camden residents by allowing a cement plant to open in a highly polluted neighborhood. The state and the cement company are appealing the Camden decision, which used new legal arguments designed to circumvent the April Supreme Court decision. While governor, Whitman supported construction of the factory.
In early July, the NAACP threatened to sue the manufacturers of lead paint. The NAACP charges that poor, minority children are most likely to be exposed to toxic lead dust from peeling paint.

That flurry of legal action is raising the stakes for Whitman as she attempts to handle the EPA's civil rights petitions. In this charged political climate, the agency's environmental justice decisions are likely to attract greater scrutiny and carry greater political consequences than ever before.

The issue of environmental justice first caught the public's attention in the late 1980s as civil rights groups increasingly accused state and local regulators of steering the dirtiest industries to build in poor, minority neighborhoods. In 1994, President Clinton issued an executive order directing federal agencies to ease the disproportionate impact that pollution has on minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Soon, community groups began filing petitions asking the EPA to police local cases of alleged environmental racism. The agency's efforts to handle those environmental justice petitions were immediately challenged by business groups and their friends in Congress, such as Knollenberg, who argued that new factories should be allowed to locate in minority neighborhoods to provide much-needed jobs.

Stuck in the middle and stymied by the congressional rider, the EPA was slow to take action; some environmental justice petitions have stagnated for more than five years.

Rather than waiting for the federal government to solve their environmental justice problems, some community activists took their cases to federal court, using Title VI to challenge state agencies whose policies, the citizens said, had an unfair impact on minority and poor neighborhoods. That's what the members of South Camden Citizens in Action did in February when the EPA failed to act on the group's petition to stop a new cement plant from opening in their waterfront neighborhood. That $50 million factory, built by the St. Lawrence Cement Group of Montreal, recycles old cement by grinding it into a fine powder for use as an additive to new cement.

The cement plant is anticipated to belch 60 tons of soot into Camden's already-polluted air each year. Nonetheless, New Jersey state environmental regulators ruled that the facility met all state air pollution standards. However, the officials didn't consider the cumulative impact that the plant's pollution would have on the community's residents, 90 percent of whom are black or Hispanic. The neighborhood is already home to a regional sewage treatment plant, a county trash incinerator, and two federal Superfund sites. Regulators also didn't weigh the potential health impact of the 77,000 trucks expected to travel through the neighborhood each year.

Sheila R. Foster, a law professor at Rutgers University (Camden), noted that even without the cement plant, air quality in the area violates EPA's health standards. "Local residents are already experiencing a high incidence of asthma and other respiratory ailments," she said.

Despite those concerns, in March 2000 then-Gov. Whitman cheered construction of the plant. She portrayed the new facility as part of the state's urban-revitalization efforts to provide much-needed jobs for city residents, who have traditionally suffered one of the state's highest rates of unemployment. At a groundbreaking ceremony for the plant, Whitman boasted that her administration was "working hard to get other industries to follow St. Lawrence's lead--not just here in Camden, but in other New Jersey cities," according to The Star-Ledger in Newark. Community leaders contend, however, that of the facility's 20 jobs, only a handful have been offered to local workers.

On April 19, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Orlofsky issued a temporary injunction preventing the Camden facility from opening. In one of the nation's clearest environmental justice court victories, Orlofsky said that New Jersey's environmental policies violated the civil rights of Camden's minority residents. He argued that state officials should have considered the impacts of the cement plant's pollution together with industrial sources of pollution already located in the community, and the anticipated truck traffic.

But four days later, the Supreme Court pulled the rug out from under Orlofsky and the Camden citizens group. In the decision in Alexander v. Sandoval, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that private citizens cannot use Title VI to sue state and local agencies whose policies or regulations unintentionally have a harsher impact on minorities. Instead, the court required communities to prove that the agencies intentionally discriminated--a far more difficult standard to meet. Legal experts say that Scalia's decision, which dealt specifically with an Alabama policy of requiring driver's license tests only in English, is expected to have far-reaching implications on future environmental justice and a wide variety of other civil rights cases. "What the court did is throw out 35 years of civil rights law," complained Joan Mulhern, senior legislative council for Earthjustice.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, Orlofsky allowed both sides in the Camden case to file new briefs. In May, he surprised everyone by once again siding with the Camden community group and ordering the cement factory not to open. Orlofsky based his new decision on an obscure section of the civil rights code enacted in the years after the Civil War--Section 1983--which allows citizens to file suit in federal court to force state agencies to comply with federal civil rights laws. Orlofsky apparently zeroed in on Section 1983 after Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens cited the provision in his dissenting opinion in Alexander v. Sandoval. As expected, the state immediately appealed Orlofsky's decision and, in late May, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the cement plant to open. Oral arguments on the appeal to Orlofsky's decision are scheduled for September.

The Camden case has become a rallying point for national civil rights advocates and business groups who have a stake in the legal future of the environmental justice movement. Several national civil rights and environmental groups have filed amicus briefs backing up Orlofsky's decision, including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense. In its brief, the ACLU described the state's handling of the Camden case as "state-sponsored discrimination."

"Camden is the perfect example of a community suffering from environmental discrimination," said Jeff Tittel, director of the Sierra Club's New Jersey chapter. "It's a minority community. It's a poor, working class area that's trying to come back. Unfortunately over the years, the powers that be have put several polluting facilities in the community." Tittel warned that the cement plant could be the death knell for the community. "This development is a lost opportunity," he argued. "Camden has seen such a loss of population and so many abandoned houses. Instead of redeveloping here with something that could be a catalyst for neighborhood revitalization, they put a plant that's going to chase people out of the neighborhood."

National business and industry groups are joining forces to support the St. Lawrence cement company. They are filing briefs arguing that Orlofsky's decision will have a chilling effect on urban redevelopment programs throughout the country. Lining up on the side of New Jersey and the cement company are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Washington Legal Foundation, and the American Chemistry Council, formerly known as the Chemical Manufacturers Association. Industry officials say the appeals court's willingness to overturn Orlofsky's injunction preventing the cement company from opening could indicate that the higher court is more sympathetic to the company's challenge.

Meanwhile, civil rights groups are also considering fresh forays into the environmental justice legal arena. At the NAACP's annual meeting in early July, association President Kweisi Mfume announced plans to sue the lead paint industry. Mfume argued that exposure to lead-based paint is a "civil rights issue" because low-income and black children are more likely to live in homes and apartments where they're exposed to lead-based paint dust. Lead-based paint was used widely in homes until it was banned in 1978. Lead poisoning has been linked to developmental problems and lower IQs in children.

Although most civil rights groups are looking to the courts for relief, some environmental justice activists are expanding the tactics they use to fight environmental justice cases. Robert Garcia, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Law in the Public Interest's City Project, said his group has stopped several high-polluting facilities from being built in minority communities in Los Angeles by developing coalitions with a wide variety of community and business groups and getting local citizens involved in community-planning decisions early in the process. Speaking at a July 11 environmental justice conference at the George Washington University Center on Sustainability & Regional Growth, Garcia said he sees the courts as the last resort, but also as an important "legal hammer" for minority communities.

The Los Angeles center's most recent success came in June when community activists blocked construction of a proposed electric generating plant in a south Los Angeles black neighborhood. The targeted plant site, which is now cluttered with defunct oil wells, is in the middle of a 1,200-acre region that community activists are trying to salvage for use as a park. But the power plant was expected to receive quick approval under California's 21-day fast-track approval process created to alleviate the state's energy shortages.

Once Garcia's group learned about plans to build the facility, it enlisted the help of a wide cross section of local and national groups--everyone from church leaders and environmentalists to local government officials and business owners in the area. He also persuaded the Los Angeles Times to editorialize against the power plant. The onslaught worked: Within days, the energy company abandoned its plans. But other civil rights activists note that most community groups are not as politically savvy as Garcia's and don't have the people or resources needed to constantly monitor and fight plant construction proposals in their region.

As environmental justice cases are getting increased attention, the Bush administration's environmental team is sorting through the EPA's backlog of civil rights cases. Regulators say that little work has been done on 25 of the pending cases, which were directly targeted by Knollenberg's rider. Those petitions challenge state or local agency decisions to grant an air or water pollution permit to a new facility in a minority neighborhood. The EPA has also received petitions charging that state and local agencies have violated a local community's civil rights by conducting biased public hearings or by failing to enforce environmental violations in minority communities.

Along with handling existing civil rights claims, the EPA could soon see a flood of new environmental justice petitions as a result of the April Supreme Court decision. That ruling barred individuals from suing state or local agencies for unintentionally discriminating against minority communities, but it didn't limit EPA's legal right to handle such cases.

Some legal scholars worry that EPA may not have the money or the political stomach to take on the most controversial, long-term environmental justice cases. "No federal agency, including EPA, has shown any proclivity toward vigorous enforcement of these regulations," said Georgetown University professor Richard Lazarus. Even if federal regulators are willing to challenge state actions, "the remedies available to an agency in an administrative enforcement proceeding are limited," he said. In fact, EPA has few legal weapons to handle such claims. It can overturn a state's decision to grant an air or water permit to the facility in a minority neighborhood. Or it can cut off federal funding, a dramatic step that would be politically unpopular.

Environmental activists predicted that business lobbyists will do everything they can to tie EPA's hands. "Business doesn't want communities of color to be able to bring these claims," said Mulhern of Earthjustice.

Business leaders say they will continue to oppose any aggressive legal action or EPA moves to limit business development in minority communities. Richard A. Samp, chief counsel for the Washington Legal Foundation, said such broad policy decisions should be left to Congress, not to the courts or bureaucrats. Environmental justice questions "really are more political than they are judicial," he said. "They should be decided by policy makers."

Indeed, the environmental justice battle could wind up in Congress. An increasing number of civil rights and environmental activists are arguing for new legislation to overturn the April Supreme Court decision. Theodore M. Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund recently acknowledged that civil rights groups would be best served by a "statutory fix" that gives minority groups more access to the courts. But many are reluctant to reopen national civil rights laws at a time when conservative Republican leaders are in control in the White House and the House of Representatives. And so far, civil rights activists in Congress have not begun drafting legislation.

"We have to take into account the political climate right now," Shaw said at the George Washington University environmental justice conference. "But one way or another, we're not going to walk away from these issues."

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Environmental Protection Agency

Margaret Kriz and Erin Heath — Fri, 29 Jun 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Established: 1970
Address: 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20460
Phone: 202-260-2090
2001 Budget: $7.6 billion
Employment: 18,657
Web Site: www.epa.gov
Function: The EPA conducts environmental research and enforces federal laws aimed at protecting human health and the environment. The agency regulates air and water pollution, hazardous-waste disposal and cleanup, pesticides, toxic substances, drinking water, noise pollution, and radiation. It also issues statements on the impact of operations of other federal agencies on the environment. Christie Whitman
Administrator
202-564-4700
Whitman took Washington by storm when she joined the Administration in early 2001 after her unanimous confirmation by the Senate. In her first days on the job, Whitman aggressively promoted Bush's campaign promise to curb U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants. But her star quickly plunged when Bush reversed his decision to regulate carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. Whitman took it on the chin again in early May, when she suggested that the Administration might back away from its support for new oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, only to have the White House contradict her. Little wonder, then, that both environmentalists and conservatives now say that Whitman, who is a moderate, is not among Bush's most plugged-in advisers. She came to the EPA after serving seven years as the governor of New Jersey, where she was known for cutting taxes, toughening state laws on crime, and preserving open space. Whitman, 55, grew up in Oldwick, N.J., in a staunchly Republican family and graduated from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. She has served as president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, as a member of the Somerset County Board of Freeholders, and on the staff of the Republican National Committee. In 1990, Whitman came close to defeating then-Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., in his bid for re-election. At the EPA, Whitman oversees a mosaic of environmental laws governing air and water pollution, toxic chemicals, pesticides, and hazardous-waste disposal and cleanup. She's a firm advocate of Bush's proposals to give state governments more control over environmental programs. Linda J. Fisher
Deputy Administrator
202-564-4711
Bush filled the EPA's No. 2 slot with a politically savvy former chemical-industry executive. Fisher, 48, served five years as Monsanto Co.'s point person in Washington on genetically modified foods. Her ties to industry have drawn criticism from some environmental activists, who contend that she'll bring a pro-industry bias to her new post. In response to those concerns, Fisher has agreed to recuse herself from issues dealing with Monsanto and with biotechnology products. Before joining the chemical industry, Fisher worked for the Washington law firm of Latham and Watkins. More important, she also spent 10 years at the EPA during the Reagan and first Bush Administrations, rising from within the ranks to become the assistant administrator for pollution prevention, pesticides, and toxic substances. In the 1970s, she served as a staff member to two House Republicans. A native of Saginaw, Mich., Fisher has a bachelor's degree from Miami University of Ohio, an MBA from George Washington University, and a law degree from Ohio State University.

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Energy Department

Margaret Kriz and Shawn Zeller — Thu, 28 Jun 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Established: 1977
Address: 1000 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, DC 20585
Phone: 202-586-5000
2001 Budget:: $18.9 billion
Employment:: 15,731
Web Site: www.energy.gov
Functions: The Energy Department coordinates national activities relating to the production, regulation, marketing, and conservation of energy. It is also responsible for the federal nuclear weapons program and the high-risk research and development of energy technology. The department collects, analyzes, and publishes energy data.

Spencer Abraham
Secretary
202-586-6210
Abraham, a congenial former Senator who shares the White House's pro-industry, supply-side philosophies, is one of the Bush Administration's most savvy talking heads. Those qualities have been important as the Administration pushes its national energy strategy. Although Vice President Dick Cheney was the brains behind the energy plan, Abraham is carrying it to Capitol Hill and to the public. Abraham, 49, has been a Republican loyalist since he began working on political campaigns during his high school days in East Lansing, Mich. A graduate of Michigan State University with a law degree from Harvard, Abraham chaired the Michigan Republican Party during the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was deputy chief of staff to then-Vice President Dan Quayle and was co-chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. In 1994, Michigan voters elected him Senator after he campaigned on a conservative, free-trade platform. But in 2000, he narrowly lost his re-election bid to Democrat Debbie Stabenow. Abraham, the son of Lebanese immigrants, championed immigration issues, tax reform, and an anti-abortion agenda while in the Senate. His only brush with energy issues came in 1999, when he introduced legislation to abolish the Energy Department. Now at the reins of that department, Abraham, who is described as a quick study, has been promoting the Administration's proposals to boost domestic supplies of oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. However, the Energy Secretary's control over national energy policy is limited to providing research money to the industries. He also oversees the federal weapons laboratories, and the cleanup of nuclear and toxic waste from there.

Francis Blake
Deputy Secretary
202-586-5500
To Bush's Democratic and environmental opponents, Blake is yet another former industry official hired to push the White House's pro-industry energy policies. Before taking this post, Blake was a top official with General Electric Co. and served a stint in the company's power-systems division, which makes natural-gas turbines. But Blake's strong political ties to the Republican Party may also have helped him get the job, and he shares Abraham's conservative, anti-government philosophy. In the early 1980s, Blake, 51, served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, and to then-President Reagan's task force on regulatory relief. Later, Reagan named him general counsel to the Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining General Electric, Blake was a partner in the Washington law firm of Swidler, Berlin, Sheriff, Friedman. A native of Boston, Blake received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his law degree from Columbia Law School. He served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Bruce Marshall Carnes
Chief Financial Officer
202-586-4171
Carnes, 57, is a former English professor who has now served as a federal employee under five Presidents. He was born in Xenia, Ohio, but as a member of a military family, he never stayed in one place very long. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Colorado and his master's and Ph.D. at Indiana University. Before entering the government, Carnes taught at James Madison University. He went on to work for the Carter, Reagan, first Bush, and Clinton Administrations. From 1985-88, Carnes was deputy undersecretary of Education for planning, budget, and evaluation, where he replaced conservative icon Gary Bauer. From 1989-93, he served at the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the director of planning, budget, and administration. Most recently, Carnes worked at the Defense Department as the deputy director of defense financing and accounting services. In his new role at the Energy Department, Carnes is charged with keeping that department's books in order.

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FERC: Back in fashion

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 05 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

In a nondescript brick building a few blocks behind Washington's Union Station, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission quietly oversees the nation's energy industries, which account for an impressive 5 percent of the gross domestic product. Ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s, the five-member commission has toiled in near obscurity. Until now.

These days, Curt L. Hebert Jr., whom President Bush named as commission chairman in January, pops up on television news shows and on the front pages of the nation's largest newspapers. Hebert's newfound fame comes in part from California's festering electricity supply problems. FERC does, after all, have authority over electricity transmission and wholesale prices. The commission also governs hydroelectric dam operations, and shipments of oil and natural gas throughout the nation.

But it's also clear that Hebert enjoys the limelight. "He's more obviously political than I was," noted Elizabeth Moler, who was FERC chairman during President Clinton's first term and is now a lawyer at Exelon Corp., a Chicago-based electricity firm.

Hebert is an outspoken supporter of supply-side economics, and he has opposed California's pleas for federal help in resolving its energy problems, which stem from the state's efforts to restructure its electricity industry. "He follows the line that what can be competitive should be competitive," said Branko Terzic, a former FERC commissioner who is now director of energy and utilities services for the business-services firm Deloitte & Touche. "He believes in the discipline of market forces -- the negative discipline if you make mistakes and the positive incentives if you do well." Electricity is likely to remain Hebert's main challenge. "The industry is going through major changes because of the electricity restructuring experiments taking place throughout the country," Moler said. "Change attracts attention."

But Hebert's profile will also rise as the White House and Congress develop proposals to increase the nation's domestic energy production and to ease the cross-country transit of electricity, natural gas, and oil. "The role of FERC could be stronger and greater than ever as they go toward a comprehensive energy strategy," said Walker Nolan, an energy lawyer at Oldaker and Harris and a former lobbyist for Edison Electric Institute. "The commission has gone from being a routine regulatory institute to tackling some of the most difficult issues the nation is facing."

As chairman, Hebert's success could depend on his ability to work with other members of the commission. Bush has yet to fill the agency's two open commissioner slots. Insiders say that Hebert also needs to harness the commission's 1,217 employees and $175 million annual budget. So far, he has gotten high marks for naming Kevin Madden, who has served in a variety of posts at FERC, to be general counsel. "Madden is an insider who is well respected at the agency," Moler said.

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Bush's Energy Secretary faces power shortage

Margaret Kriz — Fri, 09 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

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Interior's Norton could wield significant power

Margaret Kriz — Thu, 01 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

These groups portrayed Norton as an industry shill, and alleged that, while serving as Colorado's attorney general, she resisted pursuing civil rights cases. "Clearly this is a political payoff to Mr. Bush's extremist supporters in industry who have been yearning for decades to massively exploit the public lands," argued Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife.

But the cruelest cut the environmentalists thought they could deliver came when the Sierra Club described her as "James Watt in a skirt." Watt, the brash ultraconservative who served as President Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, continues to be the environmental community's most dreaded bogeyman.

The comparison to Watt was inevitable. Norton was, after all, Watt's protege. She worked with him at the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation that Watt founded in Denver and later at the Interior Department during the Reagan era. Norton shares some of Watt's political philosophy. At a 1998 party for a Republican environmental group, Norton said she supports "market-oriented, property-rights-based, locally controlled solutions" to environmental problems. Her supporters say that she's sensitive to the need to preserve wilderness, but that she will also allow more resource extraction and recreation on some of the 436 million acres of public lands that fall under the Interior Department's jurisdiction.

Despite her ties to Watt, Norton's leadership style will more likely follow the one established by Bruce Babbitt during his eight years as Secretary of the Interior. Early in his tenure, which began in 1993, Babbitt gave up trying to persuade a gridlocked Congress to adopt stricter conservation laws. Instead, he aggressively reshaped national land-use policy by drawing on his own authority. In the process, Babbitt laid the groundwork for creating 20 national monuments and restricted mining, logging, and oil drilling on federal land.

Norton is in a similar position. Because the GOP controls the House and Senate by small margins, any legislation intended to overhaul the nation's bedrock environmental laws will be difficult to pass, particularly in the 50-50 Senate. But like Babbitt, Norton will have significant leeway to interpret existing federal law--a situation that frightens some environmentalists. "Gale, armed with a bunch of bright lawyers, could go back in and start reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act," said Don Barry, a former Interior Department lawyer who is now with the Wilderness Society. "They could announce a policy of non-enforcement. They could rewrite key legal opinions. That's what the power of the incumbency allows you to do."

Norton is described as a "team player" who is likely to have significant autonomy within the Bush Administration. Although a relative unknown inside the Beltway, Norton has ties to the President's inner circle: Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, served as Norton's campaign consultant in her 1996 run for a Senate seat.

Liberals view Norton's politics as "anti-environmental," but Bush doesn't. In early January, Bush rebuffed criticism of Norton's support for oil and gas exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "Well, guess who else thinks we ought to [explore], in order to make sure we've got enough energy for the nation? The President-elect!" Bush told reporters. "It shouldn't surprise people that I've picked people who share a philosophy with me."

Norton will also enjoy an open-door policy on the Hill with the two GOP leaders who have jurisdiction over Interior issues: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and House Resources Committee Chairman James V. Hansen, R-Utah. Both lawmakers have fought Clinton Administration policies limiting recreation and resource extraction on federal lands. Murkowski has long championed new oil development in Alaska, which Bush supports and former President Clinton opposed.

Hansen sees Bush's victory as an opportunity to reverse eight years of Democratic policies on federal land use. In December, he sent a lengthy letter to Bush outlining the Babbitt-era public land proposals that he believes should be scrapped. Bush's staffers have said that the new White House team will review all of the last-minute regulations and policies that were adopted by Clinton.

At the Senate hearing, Norton would not say which Babbitt policies she would send to the scrap heap. And she distanced herself from comparisons to Watt. "I have only, really, spoken with him once in the last 10 years," she noted. Even Democratic Senators commented that the congenial Norton is far more reasonable than the in-your-face Watt.

People who have worked with Norton say she's not likely to try to jam radical new land-use policies down the public's throat. "Gale is not the kind of person to go in with a meat cleaver and say, `I have this philosophical commitment,' " said Roger Marzulla, general counsel of Defenders of Property Rights, who was at the Justice Department when Norton was at Interior and who also worked with her at Mountain States Legal Foundation.

"She's a consensus builder," argued Denver lawyer Timothy M. Tymkovich, who was Colorado's solicitor general when Norton was attorney general. "She's got a proven track record of working well with diverse constituencies who are affected by decisions that she makes."

Supporters say that Norton objected to some of Clinton's land-use policies because Interior Department regulators often failed to talk to local residents, businesses, and government officials before passing judgment. "She is a person who believes that it's necessary to get as much local input as possible in making decisions," said Terry L. Anderson, executive director of the Political Economy Research Center, a pro-market think tank in Bozeman, Mont. He is also co-author of the book Free Market Environmentalism Today and a member of the Interior Department transition team. "So you won't see a Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument approach, where the Clinton Administration created the monument without even informing the Utah [congressional] delegation that it was setting aside 1.7 million acres."

But environmentalists protest that Norton, by relying primarily on consensus policy-making, will be abdicating the Interior Department's duty to manage U.S. parks and wilderness areas in the national interest. Barry of the Wilderness Society cited the example of a recent ban on snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park, which snowmobile companies are fighting. "The status quo was that thousands of snowmobiles were going into the park, spewing air pollution and spilling fuel onto the snow," he noted. "Regulators made a decision in which they just disagreed with the local interests. I worry that Norton could give local economic interests greater traction and veto over what the Feds do."

Some conservatives predict that Norton's appointment could result in a broader adoption of market-based policies throughout the Administration. "I think Gale will be an important educational force in the Bush Cabinet as well," said Anderson, who suggested that Bush include her in his Cabinet. "I think [Environmental Protection Agency Administrator] Christie Whitman will learn from Gale more about these market approaches."

In fending off comparisons to Watt, Norton said she's "had a lot of different experiences" in the 21 years since she completed law school and joined the Mountain States Legal Foundation. In 1984, she came to Washington with the Reagan Administration, serving first at the Agriculture Department and later as associate solicitor at Watt's Interior Department. In that post, she worked on an unsuccessful effort to persuade Congress to allow oil drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge.

By 1990, Norton was back in Colorado, where she was twice elected attorney general. In 1996, she ran for an open Senate seat in that state, but lost in the Republican primary to the more conservative Wayne Allard, who went on to win the general election. When she left the attorney general's office in 1998, Norton joined the Denver law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber. One of her clients was NL Industries, a Houston-based lead manufacturer that is a defendant in lawsuits relating to cleanups at 75 toxic-waste sites and to children who were possibly poisoned by lead-based paints. During the past several years, Norton also helped create the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a conservative organization that has been criticized for receiving funding from mining and chemical industry groups. She served as an environmental policy adviser to Bush's presidential campaign. And she's been affiliated with a range of conservative think tanks that espouse market-based, pro-business environmental policies.

Norton has a full plate of issues waiting for her at Interior. She has said that she will review dozens of Clinton Administration policies that were enacted in the past several months, including the creation of 20 national monuments on federal lands. Norton will face the sensitive issue of whether to allow drilling off the California and Florida coasts. She also must decide whether to go forward with a controversial management plan for Yosemite National Park that would slash car traffic and lodging in the overcrowded park.

Norton, her supporters say, could also plant the seeds for a variety of market-based environmental programs at Interior. Anderson said that Norton might, for example, develop an initiative allowing ranchers to sell and trade their grazing permits, a move that would allow environmentalists to buy permits and stop grazing on ecologically sensitive lands. She could also expand the fee demonstration program that has allowed the national parks to establish higher service fees and keep some of visitors' money to maintain their facilities.

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EPA experiments with flexible approach

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 24 Aug 1998 00:00:00 -0400

Early this year, as congressional conservatives made headlines accusing the Clinton administration of over-regulating industry by trying to curb global warming, Weyerhaeuser Co. quietly celebrated its first year in an innovative new regulatory program initiated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Under the EPA's "Project XL," Weyerhaeuser voluntarily reduced the pollution produced by its pulp mill in Oglethorpe, Ga. In return, the EPA granted the company leeway to comply with federal environmental laws. Weyerhaeuser is one of several companies that have negotiated such agreements, which allow the firms to quickly change their production processes without enduring mountains of red tape.

Project XL is part of an agency effort to squeeze more environmental protection out of the existing laws. Regulators grant states and companies more control as long as they continue to meet federal environmental standards. "These are the approaches that will help the EPA be ready for the 21st century," EPA deputy administrator Fred Hansen said.

Hansen, who has helped nurture the EPA's new agreements with industry and the states, is thinking about legacies these days. He is scheduled to leave the agency in early October, after serving four years in the EPA's No. 2 spot--in effect, acting as chief operating officer.

Because Republican leaders are now reluctant to openly take on environmental issues or roll back regulations, industry officials are turning to the EPA for help. Some of the agency's attempts to negotiate new agreements have fallen flat, as the EPA was caught between states and businesses that want regulatory relief, and environmentalists who condemn attempts to ease federal protections. "Regulatory flexibility is hard to define," Hansen said. "What one party sees as a regulatory obstacle that should be removed, another perceives as a fundamental protection."

But over time, the EPA has begun to loosen the iron fist of environmental regulations and penalties and move toward more incentive-based controls.

One example: requiring public disclosure. Rather than ban or control many toxic chemicals, the EPA has increased the number of substances that fall under its community "right-to-know" provisions. Companies that emit chemicals on that list must annually publicize their pollution levels.

In July, Vice President Al Gore announced plans to expand the approach to supplies of drinking water. Under that plan, customers' water bills would include lists of local chemical contaminants.

But the EPA's expansive interpretation of its authority has gotten agency officials into hot water on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused the EPA of illegally expanding air pollution controls to implement the Kyoto global-warming treaty, which has not yet been submitted to the Senate. Hansen denies that the EPA is trying to prematurely fulfill the treaty. "The idea that we're somehow doing backdoor implementation is ridiculous," he said.

But with Congress and the administration at loggerheads over how to update the nation's major environmental laws, Hansen said regulators are increasingly tapping into a wealth of potential flexibility in the existing statutes. "The law really does have a much broader set of authorities," he said. "We want to utilize those authorities to make good, commonsense environmental regulations. You ought to apply the existing law very broadly, if it makes sense, rather than trying to seek changes to the law."

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Forest Service could get new home

Margaret Kriz — Thu, 04 Jun 1998 00:00:00 -0400

An idea that has been swirling around natural resources circles for decades is making a surprising comeback: Transfer the U.S. Forest Service from the Agriculture Department to the Interior Department.

Support for the idea of removing the beleaguered Forest Service from the Agriculture Department is coming from unexpected sources: House Budget Committee chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, and American Forest Paper Association president W. Henson Moore.

Kasich suggested that the government could save money by consolidating both the Forest Service and the Commerce Department's National Marine Fisheries Service with Interior's Bureau of Land Management, its Fish and Wildlife Service and its National Park Service. The savings, Kasich suggests, could be funneled to the national parks. The merger appeared in an early version of Kasich's 1999 budget resolution, but was later dropped at the demand of other lawmakers.

Moore's support for the radical reorganization is even more surprising. His organization represents loggers, who have long enjoyed a cozy relationship with USDA. But in a recent interview with National Journal, Moore argued that the affiliation has a downside. "There is a connotation that the forests are a crop," he said. "The American people reject that notion, and we reject that notion."

Moore's hope is that combining the agencies would force regulators to harmonize the regulations governing the public lands. A former member of Congress who served in the White House during the Bush Administration, Moore also explicitly endorsed placing Interior Secretary Bruce E. Babbitt, long the nemesis of western Republicans, in charge of the new behemoth. "You'd have one Secretary--a capable guy, Bruce Babbitt," Moore said.

But the proposal met with resistance from Sen. Larry E. Craig, R-Idaho, who advocates rewriting the laws governing the Forest Service.

"We should be determining exactly what these agencies ought to be doing first," Craig said. "After we have agreement on a clear mission for these agencies, then we can evaluate whether their current organization effectively serves that mission."

Environmental activists reacted cautiously to Moore's proposal. Michael A. Francis, the director of the Wilderness Society's national forest program, agreed that consolidation would help streamline public land management. But he doubted that Moore was being altruistic.

"I would read this as another ploy to punish the Forest Service for not cutting down more trees," he said.

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DOE fights Nevada nuke waste battle

Margaret Kriz — Mon, 11 May 1998 00:00:00 -0400

YUCCA MOUNTAIN, NEV.--You don't have to spend much time on the tiny train that whisks researchers and visitors five miles into the mountain before you begin to think you know what went through Jonah's mind during his encounter with the whale. Far below Nevada's windswept desert, the train rumbles down a dimly lit, 25-foot-wide tunnel, where thick metal ribs hold back tons of gray rock.

Since 1994, the Energy Department has been burrowing into this mountain, 100 miles north of Las Vegas and on the edge of a federal nuclear weapons testing site. The point of the digging--an $18 billion project involving 1,500 workers--is to let scientists determine whether this ancient volcanic mound can safely contain highly radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years.

For now, nearly 35,000 metric tons of spent, but still deadly, fuel rods and other toxic waste are stowed in concrete casks and water-filled cooling pools at 70 commercial nuclear power plants across the nation. Though the federal government will, by law, ultimately be responsible for doing something with the waste, Energy Department officials have so far refused to touch it. They argue that until the long-term usefulness of the Yucca Mountain site has been assessed, their hands are tied.

Last November, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the government is legally bound to remove the waste. Now nuclear utilities and states that host nuclear power plants are poised to slap Uncle Sam with billions of dollars in claims for breach of contract and for the costs of storing additional waste at the already-overburdened power plants.

At the same time, the utilities and the states are pressing Congress to pass legislation ordering Energy to build a separate, temporary, above-ground dump near Yucca Mountain that would be used until the permanent underground vault is completed. But President Clinton has vowed to veto that measure, and Senate nuclear power proponents are said to be two votes short of the 67 they would need to override a White House thumbs-down.

As the political and legal wrangling escalates in Washington, so do questions about Yucca Mountain. For one thing, scientists are examining new evidence that rainwater can filter into the repository far faster than was once assumed. If that's true, the water could corrode waste containers and contaminate sources of water for local farmers.

Researchers are also studying whether the repository could survive the earthquakes that are inevitable in the fault-riddled region. And they're conducting elaborate tests of how the mountain's interior might stand up to the intense heat that the more-than-70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste would generate during the next 10,000 years of its slow deterioration.

Despite those fundamental concerns, government scientists and regulators maintain that the mountain will be a first-rate place for storing the lethal waste. "In my opinion, there is no single factor that's likely to be a show-stopper," said Tim Sullivan, the Energy Department geologist leading the team that's drafting a report on Yucca Mountain due to be submitted to Congress this fall.

Still, federal scientists no longer offer resounding assurances that the mountain's geological features would prevent seepage. Indeed, researchers say they're turning to new high-technology ways of isolating the waste and leak-proofing its containers. Federal specialists also concede that not all of their tests will be completed by 2002, when the department has said it wants to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to operate the dump.

That further riles Nevada state officials and environmental groups, who've been in a snit ever since Congress picked Nevada for the site because, they maintain, certain powerful lawmakers didn't want the stuff in their own backyards. The locals contend that the federal government is hell-bent to roll the waste down into their mountain, even if critical safety questions remain. "Most Americans thought that once you put the waste in this big hole underneath this mountain, you'd have zero release," said Judy A. Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a Las Vegas-based group opposed to the dumping. "The real story is that radiation releases are very likely."

How Nevada Lucked Out

The debate in Washington has centered on health and money. Nuclear power opponents contend that the Yucca Mountain site isn't safe. Utilities and states with nuclear power plants counter that if the waste isn't quickly taken off their hands, the federal government will wind up spending as much as it did resolving the savings and loan crisis.

In the middle of the fray are Congress and the White House, which have traditionally been loath to force any state to take this mother lode of highly radioactive trash.

In the 1950s, federal officials planned to reprocess the nuclear waste to make new power plant fuel, a practice adopted by France. But the plan was jettisoned in the United States because of worries that the reprocessed, souped-up fuel might be stolen by terrorist groups and used to make nuclear weapons.

Federal scientists next recommended reviewing potential storage sites throughout the country to find places with rock that would best hold in the radiation. But in 1982, Congress scrapped that expensive and politically unpopular approach and ordered the Energy Department to focus on broad tracts of federal land in Nevada, Texas and Washington.

In 1987, Congress singled out Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the single site that government scientists could concentrate on. That deal was sealed with the help of then-House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, and then-House Majority Leader Thomas S. Foley, D-Wash., who didn't want the nation's nuclear waste in their states. Yucca Mountain has been under a microscope ever since, although research has been frequently delayed by Nevada's legal challenges and, at times, by a lack of federal cash.

Politics still weighs heavily in the dispute. Energy Department officials say they won't file their report on Yucca Mountain's suitability with Congress until after the November elections, to keep their recommendations from becoming partisan fodder.

Utility industry executives also claim that Clinton has promised to veto pending bills that would authorize the temporary, above-ground waste site near Yucca Mountain as a favor to two friends: Nevada's Democratic Gov. Robert J. Miller and Clinton's former college buddy and frequent golf partner Brian Greenspun, now editor of The Las Vegas Sun.

Meanwhile, to attract support for their temporary-repository bills, pro-nuclear lawmakers have agreed to ban shipment of any high-level commercial nuclear waste to Energy Department facilities in South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington. Some have speculated that those sites--which are already taking radioactive waste shipments from foreign governments and from the Defense Department--could be used as stopgap holding facilities for nuclear waste if work on a permanent underground repository is further delayed. In return for the proposed ban, lawmakers from those three states have staunchly supported the temporary-repository legislation.

In 1995, then-Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary unleashed a torrent of legal actions when she announced that the department would not begin collecting waste from commercial nuclear power plants by the congressionally mandated deadline of Jan. 31, 1998. She reasoned that Uncle Sam's obligation to take the material kicked in only after a permanent repository was completed.

The Search for a Compromise

Nuclear utilities and their host states immediately sued the government for breach of contract. In November 1997, a federal appeals court rejected the Energy Department's arguments and ordered the two sides to try to strike a compromise. The middle ground, however, has been elusive.

Energy offered to reimburse utilities for storing the waste at their plants. Department officials wanted to cover the storage costs with cash drawn from the $14 billion Nuclear Waste Fund, a pot of money fed by a fee on the electricity that nuclear plants generate. Created in 1982, the fund is supposed to underwrite the construction of a permanent waste repository.

Bristling at Energy's offer, the utilities and concerned states have asked the D.C. Court of Appeals to appoint a special master to run Energy's nuclear waste disposal program. They also want the court to bar Energy from using the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for temporary storage at the power plants. And they want all future payments to the fund placed in an escrow account.

First and foremost on the utility executives' minds is getting rid of all that lethal waste. "We want legislation that moves fuel," said Angelina Howard, senior vice president for industry communications at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a Washington-based trade association. "We need government to meet its obligation."

Meanwhile, many utilities are also gearing up to sue the federal government for damages. "All good attorneys are mining the industry for clients," said Mike McCarthy, administrator of the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, a St. Paul (Minn.)-based alliance of state officials and utility companies.

The size of Energy's potential liability could depend in part on how long it takes the department to take custody of the radioactive material. Industry spokesmen argue that nearly every nuclear utility will run out of storage space if the existing waste isn't moved before the Yucca Mountain underground repository is completed--in 2010, at the earliest. Those utilities will have to build new storage facilities or, they say, shut down their nuclear-fueled operations.

Even after Yucca Mountain opens for business (if it does), Energy will need at least 12 years to load up and move the waste. Industry's additional storage costs would amount to $500 million-$750 million a year, according to Eileen Supko, who is a nuclear engineer and senior consultant with Energy Resources International, a private research group, and is studying the nuclear waste issue for the NEI.

In addition, the utilities are likely to demand that Energy return the billions the industry has contributed to the Nuclear Waste Fund, Supko predicted. The utilities are also expected to seek compensation for a variety of other alleged damages. For firms forced to shut down their nuclear power plants, the damages could include the cost of buying replacement power. Other utilities might want compensation for the lower bond ratings they now receive because of their nuclear waste backup, she noted.

All in all, if the federal government doesn't move quickly, it could be handed a $56 billion bill for storage and damages, she said. Other nuclear power advocates, including Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman Frank H. Murkowski, R-Alaska, argue that the federal government's liability could soar to as much as $80 billion.

But Nevada officials and environmental advocates argue that those costs are grossly inflated. A study by the Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen, a Ralph Nader-funded consumer protection group, argues that the total cost of added storage space at nuclear-fueled power plants would be in the $600 million range.

The Political Stakes Are High

Not surprisingly, the debate dominates Nevada politics. In April, two top Democrats--Sen. Richard H. Bryan and retiring Gov. Miller--announced that they wouldn't support fellow Democratic state Sen. Joe Neal's bid for governor, because he's regarded as "soft" on nuclear waste. Bryan and Miller charged that Neal has advocated negotiating instead of fighting, and Miller said he spoke out in hopes of prodding other Democrats to declare for the governor's race before the mid-May filing deadline.

Neal, who for 25 years worked for a contractor for the Yucca Mountain project, complained that his views are being misrepresented. But he maintained that it is time to face the reality that Congress is on the brink of forcing the state to make room--like it or not--for much of the nation's nuclear waste. In return, he said, the state should be entitled to federal financing for substantial transportation system improvements. "We should also demand large amounts of cash," he said in a statement. (Neal also accused Bryan and Miller of fronting for the Nevada gambling industry, which opposes Neal's proposal to hike gambling taxes.)

Meanwhile, in the Nevada Senate race, each candidate claims to be the more anti-nuclear. Democratic Sen. Harry M. Reid and his challenger, Republican Rep. John Ensign, loudly complain that they don't want the nation's red-hot waste in Nevada.

Reid, working with Bryan, has been barnstorming across the country, delivering warnings in several cities that nuclear waste is likely to be shipped through their communities, endangering local residents. Ensign, for his part, scored an impressive strategic coup and won political points back home early this year when he used a parliamentary technicality to delay legislation authorizing construction of the temporary, above-ground waste site near Yucca Mountain.

In recent days, House and Senate leaders have been trying a new path to pass the nuclear waste bill. Murkowski and House Commerce Committee chairman Thomas J. Bliley Jr., R-Va., are trying to hammer out a compromise that both the House and Senate could quickly approve. That would save several time-consuming steps in this short congressional session. Nevertheless, Senate leaders are still fighting to pick up the two votes they need if they are to override the promised presidential veto of the measure.

Nevadans have one or two more aces up their sleeves before the nuclear waste shipments begin rolling into that state. Once Energy formally selects Nevada as the waste site, state officials plan to sue the federal government, charging that state law prohibits storage of nuclear waste.

However, McCarthy of the state-and-industry Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition argued that Nevada's states' rights case has been severely undercut by rulings in a New Mexico case. In that suit, the state unsuccessfully tried to block the federal government from storing mid-level waste from atomic weapons research at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. Shipments to that site could begin this summer.

Federal law also gives the Nevada governor the right to veto Uncle Sam's selection of the underground Yucca Mountain disposal site. But that rejection could be overridden by a vote of Congress.

Many in Nevada believe that, in any event, if a temporary, above-ground nuclear waste dump is located in their state, work on the Yucca Mountain repository might abruptly end. Not true, protested NEI's Howard, who noted that the bills to build a temporary repository in Nevada provide additional money for the underground waste facility.

But Treichel of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force said utility executives have conceded to her that, once the waste is off their property, they don't want to continue paying for what is becoming "a gold-plated" dump. And workers at the Yucca site say rumors abound that their jobs will be in jeopardy if the temporary waste site is approved, Sullivan said.

"This is a phenomenally difficult sell," Sullivan said, speaking of convincing the scientific community and the public that Yucca Mountain's underground repository will be safe. "We have to convince the technical audience that we've done a credible job. We won't have complete confidence in all areas, so we'll have to show that any problems will be taken care of with backup systems."

Despite the scientific and political uncertainties, Nevada is in the bull's-eye among politicians and utility industry executives desperate for a place to stash the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

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Mother Nature Inc.

Margaret Kriz — Thu, 30 Oct 1997 00:00:00 -0500

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZ.--Brad Traver stopped at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, his back to the majestic red rock gorge, and watched the cars streaming into the Yavapai Overlook parking lot. On this balmy October day, in an Indian summer, a few spaces remained for arriving tourists.

Not so in August, however, when as many as 6,000 cars a day maneuvered into the Grand Canyon National Park, jockeying for one of the 2,400 parking spaces. Nearly 1.5 million cars and 30,000 tour buses trek to the park each year. And that number is destined to climb in the next decade, according to Traver, who is in charge of the new Grand Canyon management plan.

"Transportation is the biggest issue in the park," he said. "It's not as much the number of people coming here as it is the number of cars."

To ease the traffic tie-ups, not to mention the noise and pollution, park officials have developed a dramatic new transportation plan that would ban cars and force visitors to use light rail to get into the park.

The project is part of the Grand Canyon plan--an ambitious $350 million face-lift that will get under way in mid- 2000. The design also includes expansive plans to repair the park's crumbling infrastructure, convert historic buildings into an education center and transfer employee housing and many tourist facilities outside of the park.

But with Uncle Sam allotting the Grand Canyon only $14 million each year, park officials have been searching for other ways to underwrite the project.

Grand Canyon National Park is not alone in its financial struggles. The country's 376 national parks--which include everything from Yellowstone National Park to the Washington Monument--are struggling to wrest from Congress some $5.6 billion for maintenance and repairs. The Interior Department's National Park Service is seeking another $3 billion to restore the parks' spectacular vistas, sensitive ecosystems and historic sites, and to buy new parklands already approved by Congress. For all that, and to operate the parks, Congress appropriated $1.57 billion in fiscal 1997.

With the federal government coming up short, the future health of the nation's most prized national parks depends on new financial tools and partnerships with industry, Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Robert L. Arnberger told reporters this month. "We cannot turn over the parks to an Olympic type of corporate investment," he said. "But we are absolute idiots if we don't realize the potential of better partnerships with corporations and with the private sector to solve problems and protect the parks."

Even bureaucrats are starting to accept newfangled ways to rustle up money for the parks. "The National Park Service is making up its mind whether it really does have to be somewhat more entrepreneurial and think in new terms, or whether it's going to continue to be completely dependent on appropriated funds," said Jim Maddy, the president of the National Park Foundation, the largest among the dozens of nonprofit groups that solicit money from businesses and foundations for the parks.

The Grand Canyon, for example, is getting help from the new Grand Canyon Fund. Officials are also planning to join forces with private developers to construct and operate the proposed transportation system. The park would repay the company's investment over a period of 15-20 years. Traver said the deal could attract $50 million in private money for the Grand Canyon.

Besides, the park is enjoying a fresh influx of cash from experimental fees that Congress instituted last year. That program has allowed 100 parks to double their entrance fees of $10 per car and to keep some of the additional money instead of funneling the entire fee to the federal Treasury. For the Grand Canyon, the program will bring in more than $20 million over a three-year period.

But the new pots of money won't be enough to pay for all necessary repairs and pollution control. "I really believe that you have to come up with some new funding ideas," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in an interview. "Otherwise you're going to see a slow deterioration of the park experience."

Teddy Roosevelt's Party

McCain has a few ideas of his own. He introduced a bill last February that would let Grand Canyon National Park sell revenue bonds to finance repairs. Under his proposal, the park would repay the bonds by charging each park visitor a $2 fee. This intriguing approach made a splash among government officials and environmental activists who have been struggling to finance park repairs while federal dollars are scarce.

In June, McCain had another brainstorm. After the Supreme Court gave the federal government the title to oil leases in waters off Alaska's North Slope, McCain proposed using the newfound wealth to set up a National Parks and Environmental Improvement Fund. Just this month, the Senate earmarked $50 million in interest from the fund each year for construction projects at the national parks and on other federal lands and for marine research in Alaska.

McCain isn't the only Republican trying to come up with more money for the national parks. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Parks, Historic Preservation and Recreation, wants to try McCain- style bonds at other national parks. "Bonding doesn't increase your wealth," Thomas said in an interview. "But it does allow you to do larger projects. Many of these parks are like small towns, and it's hard for them to do a sewer system on an annual budget. We think bonding will work."

The bonding provision is expected to be part of a larger parks bill that Thomas said he hopes to introduce early next year. The legislation is also likely to include a requirement that the Park Service hire private experts to oversee the companies that run the gift shops, hotels and other commercial services in the parks. And Thomas is drafting language to make it harder to create new national parks, because they'd deplete funding for existing ones.

Although many of those provisions are likely to be controversial, Thomas has tried to assure environmentalists that protecting the parks' natural resources will remain the top priority. "Setting up new criteria for parks doesn't mean there won't be any new parks," he said. "And encouraging private money doesn't mean we're looking to sell the parks to commercial advertisers."

These Republicans may have more in mind than preserving the nation's patrimony. They have the opportunity, McCain said, to score political points by fighting for the national parks. "Republicans are viewed by the American people as not being supportive on [environmental] issues, and it's very damaging to us," the Arizonan said. "I believe that we can and will change that view by the American people by taking positive measures rather than blocking things. For God's sake, we're the party of Teddy Roosevelt," who started the system of national parks.

That could be good news for the GOP, which came under attack from environmentalists and suffered in public opinion polls in 1995-96 after some Republicans in Congress proposed closing down the least popular national parks. The GOP's new attitude might also improve the Senators' environmental vote ratings. McCain, who has presidential aspirations, has voted with the environmental community only 15 per cent of the time, and Thomas just 8 per cent, according to the League of Conservation Voters' annual report card.

Even the Interior Department has canned the vitriolic rhetoric it used in its past campaigns against the Republican national parks legislation. Interior Secretary Bruce E. Babbitt has said he tentatively supports McCain's bonding proposal and has backed some partnerships with business to help finance park improvements.

Some of the Senate Republicans' efforts to help the national parks have also earned cautious support from national environmental groups. A July report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) endorsed the sale of bonds to finance park improvements. At the same time, the groups insisted that Congress increase traditional funding from federal appropriations and highway funds.

The report also urged better collaboration between the parks and the local "gateway" communities. "Visitor services have to grow somewhere, and it shouldn't be at the precipice of the Grand Canyon," NRDC senior policy analyst Charles Clusen said.

But Clusen and other environmental activists warn against building too many hotels, condominiums and fast-food restaurants at the edge of the parks. The parks, they fear, could become islands of wilderness within an increasingly urbanized sprawl of congestion and pollution.

Commercializing the Canyon?

Early this month, the representatives of Canon USA, Eureka Co. and Target Stores were honored in Washington for donating $1 million or more to the National Park Service. Target, a discount chain, has contributed $5 million through the National Park Foundation to refurbish the Washington Monument.

The foundation expects to hand out $8 million-$10 million in grants from private sources to the national parks this year. And the figure rises to $30 million if local fund-raising groups are counted. "We're the newest phenomenon in the parks," said foundation president Maddy, a longtime friend of Babbitt's. "We're trying to identify some ways that nationally--system- wide--we can generate some serious money."

By contributing, the companies are paying for "bragging rights," Maddy said. Target, for example, announces its contribution in newspaper ads. Eureka touts its philanthropic donation on the boxes of its vacuum cleaners. "Isn't it weird--a vacuum cleaner. But it works," Maddy said. "They say it gives them an advantage in the marketplace."

But the environmental community is skittish about such deals. Last year, conservationists passionately protested a National Park Foundation-backed bill that would have given companies exclusive rights to feature the parks in their own advertising. The clash was ironic because Maddy previously served as head of the League of Conservation Voters, the environmental community's political fund-raising arm. The legislation never went anywhere.

Clusen objected to letting Eureka advertise its contributions on its products. The ads, he said, make it sound as if Eureka is "the official vacuum cleaner of the national parks. We believe that not only are the parks sacred, the idea of the parks is sacred," he said. "From the very beginning, the parks were refuges from commercialism."

Critics are also picking apart some of the other innovative funding ideas. Environmental activists are concerned about the public-private partnerships that are becoming increasingly popular methods to build park facilities. They worry that the federal government might be giving some companies what amounts to a permanent monopoly.

Private investment experts warn that selling bonds could bring other headaches. At an Oct. 9 hearing of Thomas's subcommittee, they questioned whether the government can ensure that money would be set aside to pay off the bonds and whether the bonds could be tax-exempt. A Treasury Department official told the panel that selling bonds would cost more than borrowing from the Treasury.

"Artificial roadblocks," McCain countered. "This happens whenever you float a new idea."

Despite the squabbles, environmentalists, business executives, congressional Republicans and Clinton Administration officials all agree that the national parks need more help than they've been getting if they're to dig themselves out of their current funding hole. "We're pragmatists," Clusen said. "We understand the need for public-private partnerships." The question, he explained, is where to draw the line between legitimate fund raising and crass commercialism.

For the long haul, environmentalists argue that it's important to keep the pressure on Congress to provide more money to preserve the national parks as Roosevelt knew them. "The bottom line," said Bill Chandler, vice president for conservation policy at the National Parks and Conservation Association, "is that America's parks are an American institution that the public thinks ought to be funded primarily with public tax dollars."

The alternative, environmentalists fear, might well be the Orkin Pest Control Grand Canyon.

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A Red-Meat Issue

Margaret Kriz and National Journal — Mon, 28 Apr 1997 00:00:00 -0400

mkriz@njdc.com

In early 1993, two children died and hundreds of others in the Pacific Northwest became ill after eating Jack in the Box restaurant hamburgers contaminated with a deadly E. coli virus. Because the poisoning occurred during President Clinton's first days in office, food safety suddenly became a White House priority.

Eager to prevent similar outbreaks, the Clinton Administration took steps to begin overhauling the slow, unresponsive federal food-safety bureaucracy. It sought to restructure the Agriculture Department's food-safety program and refocus the national food-inspection system.

The food-safety concern isn't solely a matter of appearances. Federal regulators say contaminated food kills as many as 9,000 Americans every year and sickens nearly 33 million others.

Now the White House is poised to unveil the details of another food-safety initiative, this one announced by Clinton in a January radio address. The $43 million initiative would expand a rudimentary, nationwide early-warning system for foodborne illnesses and enhance seafood inspections.

But the money Clinton requested for that program would be directed to several federal agencies that handle food-safety issues, a move that citizens groups charge would dilute the usefulness of the proposals. "It's a patchwork of good ideas for a patchwork of food-safety programs," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the private Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The President's push could also be weakened by top-level departures from the Administration--chiefly Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner David A. Kessler and the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service administrator, Michael R. Taylor. Kessler and Taylor, both widely credited with keeping the White House focused on food-inspection programs, haven't been replaced.

Some activists, as well as some former federal regulators, say more ambitious steps are needed to prevent future food-safety problems. They want Congress to create an independent food-safety agency that would replace today's piecemeal system. Jurisdiction over the nation's food supply is shared by the Agriculture Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the FDA, among other agencies.

"Without that kind of real reform, we're going to be left with agencies that are just acting as recall management agencies, not protecting the food supply," DeWaal said. "That's not good enough."

But the Administration has been lukewarm about merging federal food-safety programs. In the aftermath of the hamburger contamination, Vice President Al Gore suggested that the FDA take on all federal food-safety duties. But that proposal went nowhere. Regulators are now debating whether to include a similar proposal in their coming report on Clinton's January food-safety initiative.

Industry executives oppose the push for a new umbrella agency for food safety, arguing that the congressional committees that now oversee the FDA and Agriculture would resist giving up their jurisdiction. "We'd rather put our energy into improving the coordination between the agencies," said Rhona Applebaum, an executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association.

In any event, some Administration officials concede that their efforts to improve the food-safety system have produced mixed results. For example, most of the specialists who could be assigned to food safety are at the Agriculture Department, which Congress tends to favor, not at the FDA, which has tangled with the Republicans on Capitol Hill over tobacco and drug approval issues.

As a consequence, Agriculture Department inspectors maintain nearly daily contact with food processors; FDA agents may not visit the same plant twice in 10 years.

To make up for that gap, FDA regulators have begun limiting their spot inspections and are requiring food suppliers to maintain records that, regulators say, will help them track future outbreaks of food contamination.

Experts say keeping food contamination-free is getting more difficult because of new trade agreements that have increased the amount and kinds of food being imported into the United States from countries with less stringent safety controls. Americans are also eating fewer processed foods and more fresh fruits and vegetables, which are more likely to carry pathogens. And they're eating more meals in restaurants, which might or might not be careful about the freshness and preparation of food.

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Agriculture, Business And Financial Affairs: Potential GOP Targets

Sat, 16 Nov 1996 00:00:00 -0500

AGRICULTURE DEPARTMENT

griculture Secretary Glickman has his job as long as he wants it. Just under two years in the post, Glickman, a former Democratic House Member from Kansas, has put down deep roots.

Unlike his boss in the Oval Office, he's extremely popular in the Farmbelt. Glickman has already said that he will attempt to make the most of his standing and push Congress to modify the 1996 Freedom to Farm bill that Clinton said he signed ``with reluctance'' because it leaves farmers without a safety net when prices bottom out.

In a Nov. 7 speech in Washington, Glickman said that, among other changes, he would ask Congress to loosen the new law's restrictions that, he said, can deny creditworthy farmers access to government-backed farm assistance. Noting that many farmers fret about being able to hold their own in the international marketplace, Glickman said his department will develop new risk management tools to help farmers stabilize their income in the new global economy.

Meanwhile, running a sprawling department that's often cited as a model of bureaucratic inefficiency will be a challenge.

Ellen Haas, the undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services who is responsible for the food stamp and other nutrition programs, has come under fire from critics on and off Capitol Hill. Congressional Republicans have complained about her management practices. School lunch advocates assert that she focuses too much on the goal of reducing fat in children's diets at the expense of other priority issues.

The U.S. Forest Service, which manages millions of acres of federal land and has more employees than any other Agriculture Department division, will continue to cause Glickman headaches. Timber companies and environmental activists have been virtually at war in the Pacific Northwest. Jack Ward Thomas, chief of the Forest Service, announced shortly before Election Day that he planned to step down. Separately, undersecretary for farm and foreign agricultural services Eugene Moos has said he's leaving. Glickman has asked his own deputy, Richard E. Rominger, a California farmer, to stay on the job.

COMMERCE DEPARTMENT

There wasn't nearly as much talk of dismantling the Commerce Department in the second year of the 104th Congress as there was in the first. And congressional Republicans are presumably even less likely to target the behemoth agency as the new Congress gets under way. Still, the fund-raising activities of former Commerce official John Huang could keep the department's activities--in particular its foreign trade missions--under close scrutiny.

A possible successor to outgoing Secretary Kantor is Chicago lawyer and Democratic operative William M. Daley (the Chicago mayor's younger brother), who's also talked about as a candidate for other Cabinet positions. Another possibility: former White House chief of staff Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty III, whose name has long been mentioned for the Commerce job. McLarty helped organize the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami. ``He has an awfully good relationship with the business community,'' a lawyer who's close to the Administration said.

Commerce undersecretary for international trade Stuart E. Eizenstat might seem to be a logical candidate for promotion. But despite his substantial trade expertise and years of government service, he's clashed with Kantor, whose views are likely to influence the President. Other names in play for the Commerce slot include Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., and Democratic fund raiser Terence R. McAuliffe.

ENERGY DEPARTMENT

As the Administration weighs possible successors to Energy Secretary O'Leary, one of the trickiest questions is whether Republican conservatives in Congress will renew their crusade to dismantle her department. ``If Clinton wants to keep the department, he needs someone up there in a position to defend it,'' a well-placed energy industry lobbyist said. If the President is not enthusiastic about retaining the department, the lobbyist continued, he may delay nominating a replacement for O'Leary.

Industry insiders and some Members of Congress would like to see deputy secretary Charles B. Curtis get the top job. Curtis's resume includes a stint as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and as a Capitol Hill staff specialist on energy issues.

Others being mentioned for the job include former White House chief of staff McLarty; Rep. Richardson; Colorado Gov. Romer and Timothy E. Wirth, the State Department's undersecretary for global affairs. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Carol Browner, whose name has also been floated for the post, has told associates that she doesn't want the Energy job.

Almost from the start, O'Leary made clear her intent to leave after four years. But even if she hadn't, White House officials would certainly have pushed her toward the door. During her first two years, O'Leary, the first black woman to hold the top Energy job, was praised for permitting public access to department files on secret radiation testing conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War. But for much of the past two years, sparks have been flying. The department has been frequently zapped for spending millions on questionable international trade missions and for hiring a public relations consulting firm to identify its ``enemies.''

Assuming it remains open for business, the department will soon be squarely in the middle of a building political and policy struggle over competition in America's electric utility industry. The next two years will also be a critical time for the nation's nuclear waste disposal program. Under a July court ruling, the federal government has until 1998 to take possession of the commercial nuclear waste now piling up at 110 nuclear power plants; a repository under construction in the Nevada desert won't be completed by then.

LABOR DEPARTMENT

He loved the job, and the public image that came with it--the little guy standing up for the little guy. But after a year of commuting to Boston, where his wife and their two teenagers live, Labor Secretary Reich has decided to take permanent family leave to enjoy his sons' last years at home. ``You can't make an appointment with a teenager,'' he said in an interview. He plans to serve through the January inauguration.

He'll be a tough act to follow. During his tenure, Reich effectively converted his department from a parochial backwater for a dwindling interest group into a bully pulpit for articulating the concerns of downwardly mobile workers.

Centrists in the Administration ground their teeth when the liberal former Harvard professor lectured big business about its social responsibilities, and deficit hawks nixed his plan for using payroll taxes to pay for worker training. But Reich proved his value to the President, an old friend and fellow Rhodes scholar, by gaining loyalty from labor unions initially wary of the Administration, winning a few key legislative battles--chiefly the minimum-wage hike--and by supplying Clinton with some of the popular education themes and programs of his campaign for a second term.

Possible replacements include White House director of public liaison Alexis M. Herman, a former director of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau, and former Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., former Pennsylvania labor commissioner who now heads the federal AmeriCorps program.

But the same rumor mill contends that Herman, who has developed better ties to the business community than to unions, may not be Cabinet material and is needed where she is. Wofford's old-guard liberal credentials may not help the President redefine himself as the centrist for the 21st century.

Whatever else Reich's successor chooses to do, he or she will be charged with trying to shepherd through the Congress some of the President's already-announced initiatives. These include the option of compensatory time instead of overtime pay for hourly workers; expanded family and parental leave to allow parents to attend a child's school conferences or doctor's appointments; a health insurance program for the unemployed; and college tuition tax subsidies. The Labor Secretary will also co-chair the President's announced council on health care quality and consumer protection.

TRANSPORTATION DEPARTMENT

With the departure of Transportation Secretary Pena, the front-runner for the job is probably Chicago lawyer Daley, who came close to getting the slot in Clinton's first term. Other possibilities include Rodney E. Slater, head of the Federal Highway Administration and an old Arkansas buddy of Clinton's who once ran the Arkansas Highway Commission; former Virginia governor Gerald Baliles, who headed the President's 1993 Commission for a Safe and Competitive Airline Industry and has also lobbied heavily on behalf of U.S. airlines seeking access to routes to Japan; former U.S. Ambassador to Canada James J. Blanchard; and Acting U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Charlene Barshefsky.

Several other Transportation Department seats will need to be filled as well. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief David R. Hinson has announced that he's stepping down. His deputy, Linda Hall Daschle (wife of Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D.) will serve as acting administrator, but she reportedly doesn't intend to stay around either.

Whoever ends up in the top Transportation slot is likely to be busy. The so-called ISTEA (pronounced iced tea) bill (the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which determines how federal transportation money is doled out) is up for reauthorization. Thorny international aviation disputes with Great Britain and Japan also remain to be resolved, not to mention a trucking fight with Mexico. At the FAA, one of the biggest issues facing the agency will very likely be its own finances: The White House is pushing to finance the agency's activities through a new user fee.

U.S. TRADE REPRESENTATIVE'S OFFICE

There's still a question mark over Barshefsky's future. A stalwart of the Washington trade bar, she is widely admired by Democrats and Republicans alike as a tough negotiator with a formidable grasp of trade policy. But her past legal work for the Canadian government, depending on how it is interpreted, may fall afoul of a new lobbying law that bars anyone who's represented foreign governments in trade disputes with the United States from top trade posts.

The latest indications are that Barshefsky would like to stay and that the Administration will send her nomination to the Senate Finance Committee. The White House may argue that Barshefsky isn't covered by the law because the case in which she advised the Canadian government wasn't really a trade dispute. It was a countervailing duty case, involving allegations of unfair government subsidies to the Canadian timber industry, in which the U.S. Commerce Department is--at least on paper--supposed to play a quasi-judicial rather than an adversary role.

But although Finance Committee chairman William V. Roth Jr., R-Del., is likely to give Barshefsky a sympathetic reception, some of her boosters fear that the case in her favor, while maybe legally valid, risks sounding like an effort to circumvent the broad and untested new lobbying law. In the post-John Huang era, some trade hands worry that the knives will be out on Capitol Hill for any policy or personnel decisions that raise the specter of foreign influence in U.S. decision making.

If Barshefsky doesn't get the nod (there's talk she might end up as Transportation Secretary), Chicago's Daley is a strong possibility. Daley helped the Administration pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and has provided valuable political support in Illinois. ``He's probably owed more than anybody,'' a trade lobbyist said. Other names being floated for the top trade job: deputy national security adviser Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger and former Oklahoma Rep. and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico James R. Jones.

Robert D. Kyle, a trade specialist with a joint appointment at the National Economic Council and the National Security Council (NEC), is being mentioned as a potential deputy USTR. ``He's a strong candidate for any sub-Cabinet job in the international economic area,'' including slots at Treasury or Commerce, an Administration source said.

The immediate issue facing the next USTR will be extending ``fast-track'' trade negotiating authority. After that--and looming larger than any other trade issue--will be the question of trade relations with China.

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Environment: Old Issues, Familiar Cast

Margaret Kriz and National Journal — Sat, 16 Nov 1996 00:00:00 -0500

No surprises are likely for the Administration's environmental policy team. Both Interior Secretary Babbitt and EPA administrator Browner are interested in keeping their jobs.

hat Babbitt's job is secure is a sign of a political sea change that's taken place during the past two years. In the 1994 congressional elections, the Republicans won a host of western races by campaigning against Babbitt's unpopular land-use policies. After that election, Washington insiders speculated that Babbitt's days in the Cabinet were numbered. But he may have saved himself, a Democratic House staff member said, ``when he lowered his visibility in Washington and spent more time in the West.'' This year, Babbitt and Browner also ingratiated themselves with top Democrats by actively campaigning for the party's congressional candidates.

In the 105th Congress, Babbitt may face a repeat of some battles of previous years. Two big ones might involve overhauls of the federal mining law and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Babbitt is placing a high priority on tackling overdue maintenance, land acquisition and air quality problems in the national park system. And he is expected to continue to oppose attempts by the powerful Alaska congressional delegation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to new oil and natural gas exploration.

If she stays, Browner, a protegee of Vice President Gore's, is expected to reengage in the seemingly endless battle over revamping the costly and controversial superfund hazardous waste cleanup program. That effort got a higher priority this summer after Clinton promised to clean up two-thirds of the nation's worst superfund sites by 2000. Renewed congressional efforts to rewrite the 1972 Clean Water Act will also be high on the agency's agenda.

EPA will also be at the center of two high-profile regulatory efforts destined to get the attention of Congress and the business community. The first proposal would force the states to dramatically cut their air pollution; the second would limit microbial contaminants in drinking water.

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A Hawaiian Punch for Property Rights

Margaret Kriz — Thu, 15 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

SAN DIEGO - Miriam Hellreich, the Republican committeewoman from Hawaii, believes she has a powerful secret weapon that her party could deploy to defeat President Clinton in the November election: property rights.

Hellreich is part of a growing campaign to encourage Robert Dole and Jack F. Kemp to jump on the property-rights bandwagon. ``More and more Republicans regard using the private property- rights struggle as a political weapon,'' she said.

Hellreich is a walking, talking conservative combatant in the property-rights wars. In 1992, she and a group of other property owners near Fort Pain, Ala., where she has property, thwarted federal plans to condemn their lands. The government action was part of an effort, supported by the environmental community, to create a national park in Little River Canyon. Hellreich's land, which included a key waterfall for the proposed park, had been in her family for more than 200 years.

To block the park proposal, she helped mobilize a grass-roots crusade against its champion, Rep. Tom Bevill, D-Ala. ``Any time Tom Bevill came to the district, we had landowners out there picketing with signs that said `Save Our Land,' '' she said.

As a result of their relentless pressure, the Interior Department's National Park Service scaled back its park proposal, and instead created a national preserve that included no private lands.

Dr. Philip Hellreich, Miriam's husband and a Hawaii delegate, was one of several Republican property-rights advocates who successfully lobbied for an aggressive property-rights plank in the GOP platform. That statement of principle describes property rights as ``the cornerstone of environmental progress.''

In fact, there are some clear differences between the Clinton and Dole positions on property rights, according to an Aug. 9 survey released by Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. Both candidates claim to endorse private-property rights. But Dole, who sponsored property-rights legislation in the Senate, would require the federal government to compensate landowners when the government restricts the use of their property to protect the environment.

Clinton opposes that legislation, asserting that the Republican proposals ``would cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and weaken safeguards for public health, safety and the environment.''

Miriam Hellreich said that the GOP's property-rights credentials were greatly enhanced when Dole selected Kemp as his running mate.

In a telephone interview, W. Henson Moore, president of the American Forest and Paper Association, argued that property rights could be a ``defining issue politically'' for the Republicans. ``This is one of the very clear differences of opinion between the two political philosophies,'' said Moore, who was deputy chief of staff in the Bush White House.

But Senate Republicans didn't push Dole's property-rights legislation in Congress this year, Moore said, because ``they're scared that this issue will be characterized as degrading the environment.''

Property-rights supporters at the Republican convention say that their grass-roots movement is gaining momentum. ``Over the last four years, we've seen the regulatory agencies get cranked up,'' said California delegate Bob L. Vice, who's president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. ``It's causing a lot of economic hardship to more people than ever before. It's not just in the rural areas anymore.''

Philip Hellreich said that he views property rights as dovetailing with a wide range of other contentious federal issues that appeal to Republican voters, such as states' rights and endangered-species reform.

The Dole-Kemp ticket can win support by painting the Clinton Administration as closely allied with the radical environmental groups, contended California alternate delegate Donald Amador, a commissioner with the California Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division. ``Property rights could hurt the Democratic bid for reelection,'' he said. ``Clinton is in bed with the Sierra Club, which opposes any logging in the national forests.'' The Democrats' position, Amador contended, is extremist by anyone's measurement.

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