The importance of appointees

by: Eric B.

Sat May 03, 2008 at 13:05:59 PM EDT

The ouster of Mary Gade as Region V administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency reminds us of what should be a critical presidential campaign issue, but which never gets a second's worth of attention -- who a prospective candidate is likely to appoint to key posts.

Here is what EPA administrator Stephen Johnson said about Gade when she was first appointed to the job a year and a half ago. 

“We are excited to welcome Mary Gade back to EPA Region 5 where she began her impressive environmental career,” said Administrator Stephen L. Johnson in announcing her appointment today. “With over twenty years of experience in environmental regulation and enforcement, Mary is well-prepared to lead the Agency’s largest regional office.”

Things don't always work out, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.

Five months ago, a top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official gave Mary Gade a performance rating of "outstanding." On Thursday, the same official told her to quit or be fired as the agency's top regulator in the Midwest.

At issue, as most of us know by know, is that Gade was aggressively pursuing Dow to cleanup the dioxin it dumped into the Titabawassee River, which wound up in the Saginaw River.  Although the company denies having anything to do with Gade's firing, husband of a former Dow employee, U.S. Rep. Dave Camp, R-Dow, voiced an opinion otherwise not held by anyone else and called her, "vindictive" and "insulting."  The consensus view, Camp's opinion notwithstanding, was that Gade wasn't vindictive and insulting, but that she was thorough and respectful.

The question isn't whether Dow had the woman fired.  The question is why the Bush administration had her fired, and what this tells us about the upcoming presidential administration.  I mean, by this point expecting the Bush administration to do anything except favor corporate polluters and pirates over regular people is literally asking the leopard to change its spots.

Standard operating procedure for this presidential administration hasn't been to try to repeal laws it doesn't like, but to staff key appointed positions with people who just simply refused to enforce them.  We've seen this, in both the Enron scandal, when lax regulation led to the accounting scandals that gave us Sarbonnes-Oxley, and during the crash of the housing market, when dismantled regulatory structures helped the market get out of control.  The result of that, so far, has been the bailout of Bear Stearns, foreclosures, and a looming recession that could be both deep and wide.

The same has been true of key environmental posts.  Rather than trying to repeal popular laws like the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act, the Bush administration appointed to key positions people who simply refused to enforce those laws.  Over the last seven years, that's prompted controversies from the rate at which animals were delisted from the endangered list to a decline in the number of criminal actions taken on behalf of clean water.

It's worth noting that this isn't a phenomenon that started with the current presidential administration.  Before Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, the Republican Party could stake a claim for the greenest of the two major political parties.  The party of Roosevelt, it helped give us the national parks system; the party of small government, it was the leading opponent of big public projects like the dams on the Colorado that have drawn hatred and ire over the years; and as the party of Nixon, it helped give us many of our major environmental laws (although over opposition and a Nixon veto of the Clean Water Act).

The Reagan years saw a complete reversal of that, with the appointments of the likes of James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, and Anne Gorsuch as administrator of the EPA.  Both had connections to industry, and both oversaw agencies that began to develop priorities that had less to do with environmental protection and more to do with pleasing industry.

This makes the question of appointees a critical one (although certainly not nearly so important as how well someone bowls).  It's a difficult question, because those post are typically filled after the election and the transition team is put together. But, you can develop some ideas, based on the sorts of advisers the candidates have surrounded themselves with today, and who they're taking money from.  It's not a stretch to imagine that if Big Energy is putting its money towards John McCain that the kind of person apt to be named to key energy posts will get their blessing from the folks who ponied up the dough to help him get elected.