Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration's most intense scientific and environmental controversies....
In June 2007, Obama told reporters in Reno, Nev., that he would not hesitate to reverse many of the environmental policies Bush has enacted by executive order.
"I think the slow chipping away against clean air and clean water has been deeply disturbing," Obama added. "Much of it hasn't gone through Congress. It was done by fiat. That is something that can be changed by an administration, in part by reinvigorating the EPA, which has been demoralized."
But it hardly gets to the heart of the matter: What we have here are not just policy differences, which the Bush Administration dealt with by playing keep-away from Congress and the American people. What we have is a radical break with both past precedent and reality-based sound scientific practice--not to mention the statutory purpose of the agencies involved.
In fact, the proper lens for viewing the Bush legacy at EPA and Interior is the same one laid out by Henry Waxman's staff back in August 2003, in the report Politics and Science in the Bush Administration, which is well worth recalling now, as it says so much about the entirety of the Bush Administration, and the conservative movement more generally. It's not "ideology" that's the problem here--it's ideology that is staunchly opposed to truth, integrity and openness.
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