We all know about the alphabet soup of government agencies: HUD, CIA, IRS, INS, EPA, and perhaps soon, DHS. But what really goes on inside these entities? It's easy to stereotype and oversimplify. This book exposes the messy, complex, and supremely political inner workings of the Environmental Protection Agency, from its inception in 1970 under Nixon to the early 1990s under Bush. An epilogue covers the early Clinton years through 1995. This is an important book in some ways, but, as noted below, some parts of it just weren't for me, so I'll give it a "weak +."
Joel Mintz knows what he's talking about because worked at EPA from 1975 to 1981. His research consisted of detailed interviews with more than 100 people involved in the enforcement efforts of the agency. The EPA has two main programs: enforcement and legislation. The latter drafts new environmental laws and recommends them to Congress, while the former enforces existing laws in conjunction with the Department of Justice. The EPA is overseen by Congress, and its top managers are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate.
In case you're not confused enough yet about how this agency is going to serve the interests of the American public, consider that it is further divided into 10 regional branches with partial autonomy, although they must report to the head federal EPA office. And of course, each state has its own environmental programs, many of which were already in place in 1970 when the EPA was created. This makes for a lot of bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, companies, many of which span state lines or regional territories, are grappling with the multitude of laws for waste disposal, noxious gas emission, and water pollution. Some comply, but many don't. The EPA can't be looking everywhere at once, and it might get tangled in its own structure trying to coordinate a lawsuit or other compliance measure anyway.
The first part of the book is a detailed history of EPA's ups and downs through several presidential administrations. It got off to a rip-roaring start through the Carter years when energy conservation and environmental awareness were hot. Plus EPA benefited from the general excitement factor of being a young agency with a good cause to pursue.
The early Reagan years were a staggering blow. The head administrator was Anne Gorsuch, who effectively gutted the enforcement program through various policy changes and structural reorganizations. She was ousted in 1983 after just 2 years, but she had done a lot of damage. The later Reagan years brought some slight improvement (Mintz calls these years "Away from the Brink"), but EPA continued to suffer through bad media relations that painted the agency as a blundering waste of money.
You may recall that George Bush senior (surprisingly) stressed the environment in his election campaign, and to some degree he made good on his promise. The Bush years were ones of cautious improvement at EPA. But near the end of his term, things started to turn sour again as the economy sagged. A series of reports criticized EPA's results, particularly within the ever-controversial Superfund program. Once again, EPA was in the spotlight in a negative way.
At the book's writing (1995), it was too early in the Clinton era to be sure what was in store for EPA. Of course the president was more sympathetic than his predecessors, but Congress swung heavily to the right in 1994. EPA's budget was, as usual, in jeopardy. One of the first things that happened at EPA was a significant reorganization of the enforcement program designed to eliminate duplication of function at federal and regional offices. Although this seemed promising, it turned out to bring some confusion, and EPA was still somewhat in a state of disarray in 1995.
All of this was somewhat interesting, but also a little more than I wanted to know. Much of it consisted of describing who was hired and fired, who was trying to cheat, and other gossipy stuff. I'm not generally turned on by scuttlebutt, and found myself feeling like I needed a shower after seeing the gory details of EPA life.
The final chapters got much more interesting. Here Mintz steps back and tries to synthesize the lesson. He comments on the general nature of government enforcement activities, and, most interestingly, on how to measure the effectiveness of the EPA.
It has been quite a roller coaster ride. The top EPA executives change constantly with the ebbs and flows of Washington politics, creating uncertainty for the general staff. Congressional oversight means that EPA is subject to political whims as the two parties alternate control of the House and Senate. The agency is chronically underfunded, which means that failures in its mission are a foregone conclusion.
Mintz notes that enforcement can take several stances, from a "compliance" model based on remedying underlying problems and preventing violations, to a "deterrance" model based on punishing offenders to deter potential violators. The first relies more on bargaining and bluffing, while the second is about threats and litigation. Although my first thought was that compliance sounds better, Mintz makes the point that deterrance is more appropriate for a national agency charged with EPA's particular responsibilities. And indeed, deterrance is what EPA practices, albeit imperfectly. (Mintz is not exactly an unbiased observer, of course. He believes EPA has done pretty well considering everything. And to be honest, by the end of the book, I agreed).
The most interesting part to me was how to measure success for a governmental agency like the EPA. In a corporation, there are accepted standard metrics like revenue, profit, cash, and new products in the pipeline. But what do you measure for an agency that is supposed is protect our air, water, soil, and general public health? There are many reasons that these materials change, not all of them due to corporate activity. Changes may take years to occur, and their benefit or detriment may be ambivalent. If the agency is doing a really good job, a lot of it will show up as a "negative" quality-- no environmental damage, or less than there could have been. That is notoriously hard to measure.
You may be stunned to find out what metric the agency actually uses: it keeps a record of the number of administrative orders, civil referrals, and criminal referrals made each year, as well as the total amounts of administrative and civil penalties assessed against environmental violators. These numerical indicators are public information, submitted to Congress each year and knowable by the general public. Basically, we count threats and lawsuits, plus the money they bring in.
Yow. And yet, Mintz explains quite carefully why seemingly more logical measures are in fact fraught with uncertainties, impossibly difficult to track reliably, or end up providing incentives that won't help the agency's goals. In the end, there is no easy measure of success; some sort of hybrid system would be the best, in which multiple variables are tracked and compared. The final problem is that all of this takes money, of which EPA has none to spare. Any it uses on self-assessment takes away from its mission. Clearly some balance needs to be struck.
For me, as someone not intimately familiar with the political machine of American government, this book was an eye-opener about what is really going on behind the scenes in a very small slice of Washington. I shudder to think of the larger picture, and stand amazed that anything gets done anywhere. If you like politics, this book will make you salivate and feed your interest. If not, you may get slightly nauseous. But either way, you'll learn something important about governmental function in general and the EPA in particular.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2002
