EPA meddling meant to undermine administration?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 3, 2002 | by Sean Paige

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) reputation for being the school-yard bully of federal agencies has of late taken a troubling new turn. Its choice of patsies now has gone beyond just businesses and industries that it judges a threat to the planet to include other federal agencies that aren't living up to its ecocentric ideals. Such meddling complicates the missions of agencies that find their environmental decisions and policies second-guessed by EPA, which obviously is bent on being the top eco-cop on the beat. But it also betrays a Bush administration deeply at odds with itself on environmental policy, raising doubts about whether EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman has control over what appears to be a rogue agency.

Whitman's EPA has interjected itself into three recent controversies in which it seemed to undermine the administration's interests and agenda. EPA insiders reportedly opposed efforts by the Department of Defense to exempt itself from provisions of environmental regulations that are harming military readiness by impeding the Pentagon's use of its live-tire training ranges. Officials in EPA's Denver office then publicly criticized the quality of environmental studies done by the Department of the Interior's (DOI's) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in relation to a coal-bed methane natural-gas development in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, threatening to scuttle the largest new drilling project in the nation.

Only days later the Denver office was at it again, arguing that Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks be closed to snowmobile enthusiasts. Many Westerners and recreationists see the DOI controversy as a test of whether the Bush administration will pursue the exclusionist public-lands policies of the Clinton era.

In a memo leaked to the media, career crusaders inside the EPA sharply criticized Pentagon attempts to seek relief from restrictions that have closed or curtailed use of its training facilities. Just as the memo hit the press, a federal judge responded to a lawsuit from environmentalists by ordering a halt to Navy training on a Pacific Ocean atoll, Farrallon de Medinella, because it allegedly violates the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. This decision makes the Pentagon's case for the need for certain exemptions even stronger.

In the Powder River Basin case, EPA's Denver office gave the BLM an "unsatisfactory" rating for its environmental-impact assessments of the natural-gas project, blindsiding DOI officials and supplying ammunition to environmental groups working to stop the drilling. This came only days after the Senate rejected an administration proposal to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, potentially laying the groundwork for yet another major setback in the quest to make the United States more energy independent.

Further suggesting that career bureaucrats in the EPA are running the show--and advancing their own agendas rather than the administration's--a regional administrator in the Denver office recommended that snowmobiles be banned from two national parks by 2004. Snowmobilers were ejected from the parks during the Clinton administration, but the Bush administration had been searching for a compromise.

The letter backing a snowmobile ban came as a complete surprise to Whitman and a highly displeased DOI Secretary Gale Norton, who sets policy for national parks. The two--perhaps by coincidence, and perhaps not--lunched together on the afternoon that the controversial letter hit the press ... and the snow hit the fan at DOI.