Elevating the EPA

Michael Leavitt’s unexpected departure from the Environmental Protection Agency should re-energize efforts to elevate the agency to a Cabinet-level department. Mr. Leavitt, who headed the EPA for only 13 months, is taking over the Department of Health and Human Services. He has long said that he sought a Cabinet-level position, a job that brings more power and authority.

The EPA was created by President Richard Nixon in 1970, bringing together environmental responsibilities that were spread among 10 different federal departments and agencies. Since then there have been a dozen efforts to elevate the status of the agency. Of the world’s 198 most developed nations, only the United States and 10 others, including Libya, Panama and Mayanamar, do not have a ministerial or Cabinet-level environmental department.

Former President George H.W. Bush was the first chief executive to support such a move and to ask the EPA administrator to attend Cabinet meetings. Subsequently, Presidents Clinton and Bush did the same. Early in his first term, President Bush said elevating the EPA from an agency to a department was a priority, a position that has not changed according to a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “In the Bush administration, EPA carries out the work and advances the mission of a Cabinet department. In the Bush administration, the EPA administrator has the stature, standing and authority of a Cabinet secretary. The Bush administration therefore looks forward to working with the committee to advance EPA Cabinet status legislation and make official what is already a reality,” James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said during a July 2002 hearing on a House bill to elevate the EPA.

Despite such support, attempts to create an environmental department have stalled, largely because of criticism of the agency’s policies.

Such opposition was crystallized by powerful Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens at a Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on an EPA elevation bill in 2001. He expressed reservations because he said the EPA was already too powerful and held his state “hostage” by too closely scrutinizing projects, often delaying them by years.

Sen. Susan Collins, who now chairs that committee and co-sponsored the last Senate bill to raise the stature of the EPA, disagrees. “There are many good reasons to elevate EPA to Cabinet status,” she said at the same hearing. “In a sentence, it comes down to ensuring that the environmental implications are front and center when decisions are made by this or any other administration. Elevating the EPA to Cabinet-level status will give the agency the status, the resources and the voice to do a better job for the environment and our economy.”

The bill, like many before it, never made it out of committee.

With President Bush’s support, now would be a good time to revive the push to elevate the EPA to a Cabinet department.