Word: epa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is no renegade operation: Bush, chief of staff John Sununu and Budget Director Richard Darman are fully apprised of the panel's activities. When such agencies as the EPA and the White House differ over how aggressively to implement a law, the council moves in to referee. Staffed by fewer than a dozen officials, who are, even by Bush White House standards, unusually conservative, the council regularly sides with business against the environment. Even Administration officials marvel at how powerful the body has become. "Because Quayle has Bush's total confidence," said a former Administration official, "nobody can touch...
...council's favorite target is the 1990 Clean Air Act, which the White House backed but now fears will cost more than $26 billion to implement. Last summer the council asked the EPA to make more than 100 changes in proposed regulations for carrying out the act, changes that top EPA officials say undercut the law. The most controversial proposed change would allow polluters to unilaterally increase their emissions if states ignore a waiver request for more than seven days. "You could drive a big truck through some of those holes," said a top EPA official...
...Returned to the EPA in May 1983 after Reagan-era administrators were accused of delaying the cleanup of the nation's hazardous-waste sites...
Still, the outcome could have been worse. EPA chief William Reilly, who was in charge of rewriting the manual, tried to ease the existing guidelines as little as possible. But he had to win the approval of probusiness presidential advisers. The resulting compromise may not please environmentalists, but it may derail a bill moving through Congress that would have been even more damaging to wetlands...
...manual will not become official until after a 60-day period of public comment and a subsequent EPA review, and environmental groups are gearing up to comment loudly. So are those who want to profit from the wetlands. Says Mark Maslyn of the American Farm Bureau Federation: "The new rules bring some common sense back to wetlands policy." But common sense may not be the best guide in a debate that hinges on scientific questions. As with so many other resources, America's marginal wetlands may not be fully appreciated until they are gone...