Environmental Protection Agency

Origins

EPA's establishment was a direct result of growing disquiet among the American people about their environment, a concern that grew out of the student movement of the 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. In fact, EPA's first Administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, asserted that without the public's growing concern for the environment, EPA would not exist. Politicians in the late 1960s realized the political prudence of capitalizing on the public's environmental concerns and that to seize the initiative and take control of the movement would pay off politically among a highly concerned public. With that in mind, newly elected President Richard M. Nixon appointed several key committees and commissions in 1969, one of which was the Council on Environmental Quality, which later recommended creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

But EPA was not the beginning of the federal government's role in protecting the environment and regulating its use. Beginning with the 1948 Water Pollution Control Act, the federal government assumed an increasingly larger role in environmental protection. The Water Quality Act (1956) allowed states to set water quality standards, but made them subject to approval by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). It also created a Federal Water Pollution Control Administration that administered these programs. With passage of the Water Quality Improvement Act (1970), the federal government's role in regulating and protecting the environment grew larger and so did its scope of concern.

Thanks to President Nixon's political acumen, the environment became a central concern of the Federal government, although EPA was not always consistently administered. Nixon realized that to seize the momentum in environmental protection was politically advantageous. Protecting the environment would not only place his administration in a positive light, but it would enable him to remove one more potentially damaging issue from possible presidential campaign opponents in the U.S. Senate. Thanks largely to the work of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the Nixon administration became a forceful advocate for the environment until 1973, when Nixon was safely reelected to the presidency and no longer saw political value in environmental activism. That EPA continued to exist made environmental protection, by many estimates, a powerful function of the federal government.

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