Whose agency is it, anyway? How OMB runs EPA.

• Author: Sibbison, Jim
• Position: Office of Management and Budget, Environmental Protection Agency

WHOSE AGENCY IS IT, ANYWAY?

HOW OMB Runs EPA

Before he was elected president, Ronald Reagan complained that the Environmental Protection Agency lacked an understanding of industry's problems. In his five years in the Oval Office, he has changed all that. Today industry executives help rewrite some EPA regulations before they go into effect, giving corporations more influence over the nation's environmental policies than ever before.

The procedure works this way: EPA writes the first draft of a new regulation after receiving volumes of facts and opinions from industry, environmental organizations, and other concerned parties. This process is legal and similar to those in other government agencies. But Reagan has added an extra loop to the circuit. An executive order issued right after his inauguration in 1981 directs the White House Office of Management and Budget to clear every new EPA regulation before it is promulgated.

In time, most regulations win perfunctory approval. Occasionally, however, the projected cost to the affected industry is huge. In such situations, OMB officials have quietly teamed up with corporate representatives, who tell them how they want the regulation changed to reduce the cost. OMB has demanded that EPA make the necessary changes, and OMB tends to get what it wants. No records of these OMB-business contacts are kept. It's all done in secret, outside of the law.

As a former EPA press officer, I can say confidently that even Richard Nixon never established an arrangement for corporate influence as ingenious as this one. To the contrary, when I was at EPA during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, the White House would sometimes exert pressure on the agency's leaders to do industry a favor-- no president ever lobbies for environmental causes--but its role was advisory and informal.

That's no longer the case. Looking back now, it's possible to say that the first known instance of the silent shift of power to OMB and the White House took place in the days of Anne Burford's tenure at EPA. Her chief of staff, John Daniel, noticed something strange about the way a water pollution regulation affecting the iron and steel industry was written after it came back from OMB. The languae, Daniel noticed, was so technical that no OMB lawyer could have written it. He knew it had to have been done by industry personnel. The final version also happened to save industry a bundle of money. Daniel explained OMB's role in the matter at a House of Representatives hearing. When Albert Gore Jr. asked Daniel whether he thought OMB in general "acted as a back door channel to let the corporations affected hotwire the regulatory process to get the result they wanted,' Daniel replied, "I think you have correctly characterized it. Yes.'

By the time William Ruckelshaus replaced Burford in 1983--he had been the first administrator of the EPA in the early 1970s--the steel producers were back for more. This...