Two former Environmental Protection Agency administrators for Republican presidents castigated ongoing political attacks against the the agency and its regulations.
William Reilly, EPA chief for George H.W. Bush and a co-chair of President Obama’s oil-spill commission, said he lamented what he suggested were unfair attacks on the agency from members of Congress and Republican presidential candidates.
“It’s hard to understand the attacks that continue to be mounted at the agency as it conducts the job that Congress set for it,” Reilly said Monday at an event sponsored by the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington.
The EPA has proposed or finalized a number of pollution regulations during the Obama administration. The agency has said many of those, however, were rewritten under a court order or long overdue.
In the current Congress, the GOP-controlled House has passed numerous bills blocking, weakening or delaying EPA regulations that target harmful emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities. Also Republican presidential candidates on the campaign trail have called the EPA a job-killer, with some vowing to roll back regulations or abolish the agency entirely.
Reilly also pointed to a bill that passed the House and would gut the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources.
“If we can’t address mercury and some of more obvious and pernicious threats, addressing what really strikes me as the most dangerous one lurking out there in the future, climate change, is going to be really impossible,” he said.
William Ruckelshaus, the first-ever EPA administrator after President Richard Nixon created the agency, said GOP presidential candidates who are threatening to eliminate the EPA would face immediate backlash if they were to succeed.
“If their attitude doesn’t change about EPA that would give me great concern,” Ruckelshaus said, though he added there are some legitimate areas for improving how the EPA runs and implements its rules. “I don’t think a decision like that would last longer than a year.”
