As the Trump administration concludes its first 100 days in office against a backdrop of aggressive efforts to dismantle the EPA, it may seem difficult to imagine a golden era of environmental legislation, ushered in by a conservative Republican president with strong bipartisan and public support. Yet 47 years ago, within the first 100 days of the EPA, Ruckelshaus successfully established a sweeping anti-pollution vision and laid the groundwork for a sophisticated and effective regulatory framework. Looking back on the EPA’s origins and early successes is a reminder of how much the agency was able to achieve with an engaged and supportive administration, Congress, and public.
“What defined EPA in its earliest days was less the need to define a regulatory agenda than a need to convey a sense of mission and purpose to the public, the states, and the regulated community,” Ruckelshaus recalled in a March 1988 EPA Journal article.
The 5,800-employee fledgling agency posed challenges in both internal cohesion and public credibility. To address the former, Ruckelshaus delegated the internal organization of the staff to his deputy and focused on clarifying exactly what the agency’s mission would be. After consulting his own staff and looking at two other agencies—NASA, which had a very narrowly defined goal (“let’s get to the moon in ten years”), and the Office of Equal Opportunity, which had a broad and amorphous goal (“let’s do something about poverty”)—he decided the EPA would be focused on pollution abatement, which was, in his words, “identifiable enough, understandable enough to let us know what we were doing.”
