Clinton Plan Could Have Major Impact On Environmental Research Priorities

Research Priorities Author:RON KAUFMAN Policy watchers say President Bill Clinton's proposed restructuring of the environmental advisory groups within the White House and other proposed changes could alter not only the arrangement of how the government oversees environmental research and development, but also the thematic approaches to this type of R&D. They say researchers may find themselves working with a whole new set of priorities. During the presidential campaign, candidate Clinton spoke of a "new covenant for environmental progress," emphasizing a commitment to enacting strong environmental protection programs. Last month, the president declared he was taking his first steps toward that goal by dismantling the 24-year old Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), establishing a new White House Office on Environmental Policy (OEP), and announcing a dedication to elevating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Cabinet. Clinton's commitment to putting EPA into the Cabinet suggests he may support, instead, the creation of a Department of the Environment (USDE). Legislation for such a move, which the Senate passed last year but was then stalled in a House committee, was reintroduced last month by Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio). The bill (S.171) would construct a new Cabinet-level department and also includes plans for a Bureau of Environmental Statistics, a United States-sponsored international energy conference, and a Commission on Improving Environmental Protection. "I think the Glenn bill is a logical first step in what will be an evolving new department," says Douglas Costle, former staff director for the Ash Council, which drafted the organizational plans and lobbied for the creation of the EPA in 1969-70. "This is the first step to creating significant changes in the intellectual focus of our mission. Researchers could be influenced with newly redefined priorities and reshaped future agendas," he says. "When you change the institution, you change the institutional perspective." Costle says the time has come to redesign the government's environmental institutional base. "EPA was originally formed to principally deal with pollution," he says, "but command and control regulation is a limited tool. You need to be engaged in the longer-term strategic planning. Our new mission should be to influence the nature of technology in the next century so it embodies environmental awareness." During Clinton's February 8 reorganization announcement, the president characterized the changes as "moving in a new direction" and "streamlining" the government. "We face urgent environmental and economic challenges that demand a new way of thinking and a new way of organizing our efforts," he said. Clinton's announcement closely followed the release of two reports advocating a reorganization of the federal agencies responsible for environmental R&D. The reports were published by the New York-based Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government and the National Commission on the Environment, a division of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) of Washington, D.C. Members of both commissions say the two reports have received a respectable amount of "quiet approval" in Congress. Along with supporting all the components of the Glenn EPA elevation bill, the studies suggest that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) be taken out of their respective agencies, the Department of Commerce and Department of Interior, and combined into one monitoring bureau in USDE. Also, the reports propose the creation of advisory panels to establish broad-based, national policy objectives concerning the direction of environmental R&D research, called the Office of En- vironmental Quality in the Carnegie report and the National Environmental Strategy by WWF. "A restructuring of this sort will affect researchers in at least two ways," says Gilbert White, a member of the task force that produced the Carnegie report, entitled "Environmental Research and Development: Strengthening the Federal Infrastructure." "First," says White, a professor, emeritus, at the Institute of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, "it would mean that researchers working for the government or receiving federal funds would have a much more comprehensive set of priorities guiding their research activities. And second, this would be a way of facilitating greater cooperation between branches of the government." Mark Schaefer, senior staff associate of the Carnegie task force, says a federal reorganization would have its largest impact on government researchers. "I think, regardless of what department or agency an individual works in," he says, "if these recommendations were implemented and greater efforts were made from the White House to clearly articulate the directions our R&D programs are to be moving, then scientists in the field will be given a much better idea as to the purpose of their research and have an opportunity to direct their work towards some well-defined, long-term objectives." Schaefer says the report proposes tying the various elements of the federal R&D system together, in contrast to the current method, which he describes as "a bunch of discrete parts that operate independent of each other." Clinton's announcement of the elimination of CEQ and the creation of OEP--15 staffers who will coordinate the administration's environmental policy--was applauded by some environmentalists in the popular press, but lambasted by others. The influence of CEQ, organized by Congress in 1969 to advise the president and implement the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), has diminished in recent years. Former President Ronald Reagan cut CEQ's staff from 60 to 16, and the Bush administration virtually ignored the group, instead heeding Vice President Dan Quayle's Council on Economic Competitiveness. Roger McManus, a botanist and president of the Washington, D.C.- based Center for Marine Conservation, says if Congress agrees to abolish CEQ, the Clinton administration would have no mechanism to enforce NEPA regulations, which require federal agencies to compile environmental impact statements for public release. "I think this decision [to eliminate CEQ] was made on the fly," McManus says. "NEPA helps ensure that the government is honest. Many scientists and researchers who have connections with public policy have been able to review the govern-ment's actions [through the environmental impact statements] in some detail and critically examine both the policy issues involved and the science that's behind it. Without an effective NEPA, scientists would have no legal basis for providing comments."

Clinton Plan Could Have Major Impact On Environmental Research Priorities

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