The EPA's Environmental Stewardship Initiative: Attempting to Revitalize A Floundering Regulatory Reform Agenda

In January 1999, at the direction of former Vice President Gore and under the auspices of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, the EPA formed a Task Force on Innovative Approaches to Environmental Protection. The Task Force was charged with assessing the EPA's progress on reinvention activities - to "take stock" of the EPA's reinvention efforts in order to "identify 'what's working' and to integrate successful approaches more broadly into day-to-day operations." Following this assessment, concrete proposals were to be developed to improve and expand upon the EPA's existing reinvention agenda. Such proposals were to focus on "innovative" efforts to achieve full compliance with environmental laws as the baseline performance standard for the regulated community and to encourage voluntary performance exceeding the baseline standard. Inherently, however, the Task Force's ultimate assignment incorporated a more pragmatic concern. Given the political importance of reinvention to the Clinton administration, and considering that the following year was a presidential election year, the Task Force was essentially asked to do no less than revive and reinvigorate the EPA's floundering reinvention agenda. The Task Force's work culminated in the September 1999 release of a report entitled Aiming for Excellence: Actions to Encourage Stewardship and Accelerate Environmental Progress. The Aiming for Excellence report outlines a collection of EPA reinvention initiatives and activities "aimed at encouraging stewardship and improving environmental performance." Notwithstanding the palpable importance of the environmental stewardship initiative to the Clinton administration's desired environmental regulatory reform legacy, however, the administration and the EPA were either unwilling or unable to learn from past mistakes. This Article argues that, although in some ways randomly responsive to criticisms of previous efforts, the environmental stewardship initiative fails from a holistic standpoint to adequately address critical concerns that have undermined the effectiveness of earlier EPA reinvention programs. For example, Aiming for Excellence appears to continue the EPA's self-defeating "kitchen sink" approach to environmental policymaking; that is, the agency tends to simultaneously undertake more reinvention initiatives than optimal without prioritizing between programs in terms of either effective and efficient use of limited resources or careful consideration of possible adverse interactions between numerous proposed policy instruments. Perhaps more importantly, the environmental stewardship initiative suffers from the same lack of explicit congressional authorization and support that has damaged and destabilized the efficacy of prior EPA reinvention programs. Despite the Task Force's charge to critically assess the progress of reinvention - to literally "take stock of EPA's reinvention work" to identify what is and is not working - the environmental stewardship initiative fails to address sufficiently these and other crucial factors that severely limit opportunities for success in reinvention experimentation. Unless such issues are adequately addressed and satisfactorily resolved in the future, either through modification to the environmental stewardship initiative itself or otherwise, significantly better alternatives to command-and-control regulatory approaches applicable on an industry-wide basis will continue to remain well below the visible horizon.