On Clean Air, Environmental Chief Fought Doggedly, and Won (original) (raw)
U.S.|On Clean Air, Environmental Chief Fought Doggedly, and Won
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/05/us/on-clean-air-environmental-chief-fought-doggedly-and-won.html
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- July 5, 1997
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July 5, 1997
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Section 1, Page
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It was the final night of the budget crisis of 1996, and top White House and Congressional negotiators wrangled over whether to pass a sweeping spending bill or to shut down the Federal Government yet again.
Among the very last questions on the table was an obscure provision limiting the Environmental Protection Agency's powers. Would the agency agree to give up its authority to review wetlands permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers?
No way, insisted Carol M. Browner, the Administrator of the environmental agency.
A career environmentalist with a reputation for sticking her neck out, Ms. Browner had already succeeded in stripping the budget bill of several other riders intended to gut her agency's enforcement power, and had persuaded the negotiators to add $757 million to her annual financing. Her persistence had paid off so far, and she sensed that her opponents would blink one last time. When the final deal was signed, she got her way with the wetlands.
''That is her talent,'' said one of her senior legal aides the other day, ''an extreme focus on a single issue where she is completely certain that she is right.''
That was Ms. Browner's approach over the last few months to an intense internal debate in the Clinton Administration over toughening air quality regulations. With almost nobody taking her side in public, she stood her ground against Republicans, big business and even many Democrats who thought her proposed standards would cost more than the health benefits were worth.
Asked about her lonely crusade to combat soot and smog in the nation's cities, she says gamely that her main allies were the law and the science, and that they left little room for compromise.
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