Restoring Public Trust in Government: A Prescription for Restoration

An Address by
William D. Ruckelshaus

The Webb Lecture
November 15, 1996
Washington, DC

Americans have always had a peculiar relationship with their government, especially with the laws and regulations that impinge on their daily lives and with the people, like many of you in this room, whose business it is to carry out those regulations. There's an old rubric that characterizes how this plays out in other nations. In France, they say, everything is either prohibited or allowed. In Italy everything is allowed, especially that which is prohibited. In China, everything is prohibited, especially that which is allowed. And in Singapore, everything that is not prohibited is compulsory. It seems to me the best way to apply this to the United States is something like 'everything, whether prohibited or allowed, winds up in court.'

Actually, as we all know, Americans today both demand a great deal of their government while at the same time exhibiting monumental distrust of government actions, especially at the federal level. Trust has been leaking away for at least the last three decades - according to a Gallup poll, first taken the last year of the Kennedy administration, 63 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government; this year it was down to 13 percent. It has been on a steady downward slope for more than 30 years. Clearly, many feel this trust has eroded for good and sufficient reasons. The famous scandals, the abuses of power stand out like grim tombstones in our recent history. Attach the suffix "gate" to any word and we all know what it means. But, in truth, unless the people can place some minimum degree of trust in their government institutions, free societies cannot function. To me, this is the central, ugly fact confronting public administration in the United States, because mistrust engenders a vicious, descending spiral. The more mistrust by the public, the less effective government becomes at delivering what people want and need; the more government bureaucrats in turn respond with enmity toward the citizens they serve; the more ineffective government becomes, the more people mistrust it, and so on, down and down. If that spiral continues to whirl, the laws will cease to be administered and, when the inevitable chaos starts to bite, the society will become less free.

To avoid this dark fate, the country must generate a renaissance of trust, so that the government, at all levels, is no longer them but us, as it ought to be in a democracy. I think this can be done. What I'm here to tell you about this afternoon is that it has already started, remarkably enough in the very area that has historically been the very center of mistrust - in environmental protection and resource management. That's the good news. The catch is that the restoration of trust here is going to require the most profound changes in the way public administration functions in the environmental field, and perhaps in others, as well.

To understand the nature of the solution, you have to understand to some extent the genesis and the depth of the problem. Let us recall that starting 25 years ago this country began a heroic series of environmental programs on a wave of public enthusiasm. Its programs have had an enormous beneficial effect on all our lives. Despite that, EPA is assailed by interests on both sides of the environmental debate and is regularly cited as the paradigm of a bureaucracy out of control.

The reasons for this paradoxical situation are as complex as the uncoordinated tangle of our nation's environmental laws, but the salient factor to my mind is this: EPA does not inspire trust because it was created out of profound mistrust. From the beginning, those who with great energy pressed the environmental revolution considered that pollution was an evil that had to be utterly expunged. The laws were written, in most cases, to require the elimination of any palpable effect of pollution with a margin of safety, and without regard to costs. Could industry be trusted to do this? Of course not. It was not in its economic interest to do so, and besides, in the early days of the struggle, industry had often dragged its heels, cheated, and provided misleading information. (I believe this is currently the exception rather than the rule, but it still happens.) Could the states be trusted? Of course not. In many cases state legislatures were considered to be in thrall to industrial interests and many set themselves up as pollution havens in order to attract industry and create jobs. Besides, if the states had the competence to deal with pollution in the first place there would have been no need for federal regulation.

Then, surely the federal government itself could be trusted? Not so fast! It was conceivable that the administration could at some date not afford environmental protection a sufficiently high priority, and so there were written into the statutes a set of specific standards that had to be achieved within stringent deadlines. Flexibility and discretion in applying them were largely stripped away from the senior officials of the EPA. Also, ample provision was made for citizen suits, and the provision has been amply used. Over 65 percent of the actions EPA takes end up in court. (Such things as citizen suits and Freedom of Information Act requests are ways in which a mistrustful citizenry can try to reclaim power it thinks is being misused. This is a notably clumsy way of doing this; there is a better way, which I'll turn to in a moment.)

Despite these unwieldy aspects, however, our environmental protection system racked up some notable successes, although some might argue it did so at excessive cost and far more slowly than necessary. Cars were made far less polluting. The wastes pouring from industrial smokestacks and waste pipes were greatly reduced. The indiscriminate dumping of toxic chemicals was largely stopped.

But, at present, the most significant threats to our domestic environment seem to lie, not with major industrial sites, but in the habits of we ordinary Americans: we like to drive big, powerful cars, use a lot of electricity, generate a lot of waste, enjoy cheap food, and live in grassy suburbs. When EPA actually tries to deal with this new sort of problem, for example, by mandating auto inspections and regulating non-point-source run-off from farms and suburban areas, it is intruding on some of the more sacred precincts of American life - driving, for example, and economic opportunity, and the free use of private property. Here, where the willing cooperation of millions of people is required, a high degree of trust is absolutely essential. Americans today are not going to inconvenience themselves just because someone in Washington tells them the medicine will do them good. So lack of trust now tends not merely to slow environmental progress, but to bring it to a halt.

That's a quick sketch of the problem. The solution will have to come from two very different places. First, the national armory of statutes will have to be revised to reflect current environmental realities as well as to realize the vision inherent in the EPA's original foundation in 1970 - an agency capable of an integrated approach to threats across the spectrum of environmental media, an agency capable of setting new priorities in the light of developing scientific knowledge and technical abilities, an agency with the administrative flexibility to tackle what appear to be the most pressing environmental problems of the day. As many of you know, the Center for Strategic and International Studies is cooperating with the National Academy of Public Administration and the Keystone Center, with support from Congress and the administration, to press ahead with just such a solution in the Enterprise for the Environment project.

But such reform at the center will not be sufficient to restore the trust that has been lost. Reform at the periphery is also required to cope with the kind of contentious local battles that fill our TV screens with yelling crowds carrying signs and our courtrooms with interminable litigation. Getting federal or state authority to deal effectively with problems of this type is much like teaching an elephant to repair watches. It's not a question of technical ability or bureaucratic ineptitude. It's a scale problem.

Here I don't mean a mere repetition of the usual populist cant that government is best when it's closest to the people. Simply pushing a problem down from the federal level, say, to the states, is not of itself going to fix things because without adequate authority and technical ability and resources, the game will not play in a smaller arena either. Deciding on the appropriate scale for dealing with a complex problem is itself a complex process. It's one that businesses, for example, agonize over. Small is not necessarily beautiful; it's not necessarily ugly either - just appropriate under certain conditions and not in others.

A good example here is our policy in dealing with two different birds. One, the bald eagle, was close to extinction 25 years ago. We saved the eagle by acting on the national level. We banned the pesticides that were destroying its eggs. No conceivable set of local efforts could've done that. In contrast, we've spent years of contentious effort trying to rescue the spotted owl using national legislation and enforcement. Whether the owl has a future is still the subject of strenuous debate and litigation, and the fight over its habitat is still far from being resolved. We have been trying to solve what is essentially a local problem with tools of an inappropriate scale.

But even if we do decide that a problem is best handled in a smaller arena, we should recall that if you're in a fight to the death with poisoned daggers, a smaller arena is not necessarily a good thing. The point is to stop fighting and start generating creative solutions, which is what the new cooperative decision-making processes are all about. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if they continue to flourish as they have in the past few years, this approach will work profound changes in the way we Americans deal with our most difficult domestic environmental problems.

Strictly speaking, of course, the cooperative approach is not new but arises from something deep within the American grain. We have never conceived our nation as consisting only of the People and the State. We are a densely civic society and have been since the days when De Tocqueville observed that no sooner had five Americans gathered together than they had hatched a plan for some civic improvement. It has taken some time, but the same social impetus that gave us our parks and museums and other local improvements has now been directed at issues that once were the exclusive province of technically-trained government experts.

Perhaps we may date this change from the late sixties, when Harvard University proposed to build a laboratory in Cambridge dedicated to the new, and to some, terrifying field of genetic recombination research. Bitter controversy bloomed until the Cambridge City Council refused to issue a permit to its mightiest institution until it had been demonstrated that the facility would not pose unacceptable risks. The city established a committee of ordinary Cambridge citizens to gather evidence from both sides of the dispute, and for weeks these people sifted highly complex testimony from some of the greatest scientists in this field. In the end, the facility was built, with the safety arrangements chosen by the committee. It was a wise and stable decision - the many similar gene labs that have been built since that time rely on versions of the protective protocols developed in Cambridge - and no other community has had to go through that sort of controversy since.

In 1984, while I was at EPA, we confronted a similar situation in Tacoma, Washington, where the problem had to do with community complaints about a smelter emitting toxic fumes. The community was sorely divided and largely ignorant of the complex scientific and economic issues involved, which did nothing to reduce the intensity of the controversy. With technical help from EPA, the community was able to educate itself, and they found that they did not, in fact, have to choose between jobs and health. A panel of citizens developed a plan that allowed the smelter to continue its operations in a safer way. In this exercise I was struck by the ability of local groups not only to drive to consensus on complex issues, but to invent solutions that had simply not been thought of while combat was in full swing.

Since that time, cooperative decision-making processes have arisen spontaneously and in increasing numbers throughout the country. In some cases the goal was to bypass longstanding deadlocks. People, it seems, want their environmental problems solved and not merely massaged by government officials, and perpetual litigation seems to have limited appeal as a spectator sport. The west seems to have specialized in this sort of process, probably because it is in the small timber, ranching, and mining communities of the west that the conflicts between livelihood and environmental protection seem particularly sharp.

A good example comes from the state of Washington. During the time that federal authorities were building up to the current gridlock over old-growth forests and the spotted owl in the national forests, the state Department of Natural Resources was working with concerned citizens to defuse the issue with regard to the extensive state-owned forests on the Olympic Peninsula. It set up a Commission on Old Growth Alternatives, consisting of 33 knowledgeable citizens drawn from conservation and wildlife interests, the timber industry, the Peninsula communities, Indian tribes, as well as legislative leaders and experts in economics, forestry and the law.

Formally, it was chartered to make recommendations that would provide three things: reasonable revenue flows from public timber to the schools, as required by state law; ecological diversity and the availability of wildlife habitat, especially for rare or endangered species; and an adequate supply of timber from these lands to local industry.

The commission was not an advisory group, nor was it strictly speaking a forum for negotiation, nor was it in a hurry. The point of the commission was to allow a group of concerned people to absorb a considerable quantity of information, to discuss that information in a non-adversarial setting, and to develop original solutions outside the usual polarities.

The Commission on Old Growth Alternatives met for nine months, the first four months of which were devoted to taking in information from technical experts. As a result of this information, the commission reached a remarkable and unprecedented consensus on a set of recommendations, including the creation of a 260,000-acre experimental forest on Olympic Peninsula State Trust land to explore techniques for producing a level of timber harvest comparable to contemporary practices while retaining many of the ecological values typical of old growth forests and the deferral from cutting for 15 years of 15,000 acres of old growth timber identified by biologists as critical to spotted owls.

The work of the Old Growth Commission shows that when concerned citizens take the time to master an issue, when they are able to conduct their deliberations outside the courts or the political fishbowl, they can learn to speak a common language and come up with creative solutions for problems that appeared to be frozen in a perpetual contention between narrow interests.

The war in the woods in the Pacific Northwest is bad enough, but it is mild in comparison to the disputes over water that take place in the arid Intermountain West. It's difficult to exaggerate how violent - sometimes literally violent - these water disputes can get. Think of burning a flag in an abortion clinic built on top of a Superfund site. Yet cooperative processes are starting to be used even here, which I think is a good sign. If you can get consensus on dry-lands water use, you can get it on anything.

A prime example is the Clark Fork Basin Project in Montana. The central issue here is the preservation of in-stream flows. Adequate flow is what keeps prized fish like trout and salmon alive, and what keeps the freshwater ecosystem that supports fish intact during dry years in the face of withdrawals for agricultural irrigation. To make things even more interesting, there's also a Superfund site in the basin.

The essential problem was that under Montana law, flow is doled out via so-called water reservations, each of which had always been a hotly contested legal procedure, with farmers and ranchers on one side and environmentalists and sports fishermen on the other. These battles were exhausting and tended to benefit lawyers rather than either farmer or fish. Seven years ago, the Northern Lights Foundation helped organize the Clark Fork Basin Committee, comprising representatives of both sides in the traditional combat. Somewhat to its own surprise, the committee managed to hammer out an agreement that suspended the legal disputation for four years. During this cease-fire, the parties agreed that they would work together on a basin plan that would resolve the outstanding in-stream-flow issues in its various rivers. The Montana legislature approved the idea and the committee became a state-chartered commission. Last year, the commission issued a set of recommendations that included allowing farmers with water rights to lease their water to organizations desiring increased in-stream flow for fish, a remarkable and unprecedented solution. The recommendations were incorporated into statute by the Montana legislature.

Cooperative decision-making processes are now widely distributed in the west. By one count, over 60 basin or watershed efforts are now under way in the Colorado River drainage alone.

It is essential to understand that each of these efforts is unique to the problems, the locale, even the personalities involved. This approach is absolutely not something you can stamp out with a cookie cutter. Nevertheless, even at this preliminary stage, it is possible to derive some general lessons about how to set up a successful cooperative project.

First, every important stakeholder must be brought in at the very start of the process. Everyone has to be in the boat rowing. You can't leave anyone on shore, because those are the people most apt to heave rocks as the boat goes by. When you include all interests you almost guarantee that the result will transcend the sterile posturing of single-interest politics, and that people will learn the habit of listening before passing judgment. Involvement has to be early because, remember, you're operating in an atmosphere of deep distrust. No one wants to feel co-opted by some prior set of assumptions or decisions. The very point of the process is that everyone gets to see the cards dealt, everyone gets to kick the tires on the technical issues.

Second, the relevant governmental authority must declare in unambiguous terms that the process is the only game in town, and that what comes out of the process will more or less prevail as public policy. This is essential in order to get former opponents around the same table to work together in good faith. If one or another party thinks it can get another bite at the apple in some other forum, they will hold back from the full cooperation necessary for success. Let me note here that these processes are utterly different from the typical public meeting, where people state their positions and afterward are under no obligation to listen to any opposing statements. In cooperative processes you have to listen to the other side.

Third, you need professional facilitation and access to extensive technical advice. We've learned that ordinary citizens have an amazing ability to filter through scientific information that may contain contradictions and come up with reasonable findings. Now, here's a somewhat subtle point about the involvement of government agencies in providing technical support or facilitating these processes. I said you need the backing of government in these things, and you do, but while government can initiate and participate in such processes, it is probably best for the actual cooperative decision-making group to operate under the auspices of a non-governmental, demonstrably neutral, organization. The point, after all, is that lots of people don't trust the government.

Fourth, you have to confront economics in some detail. What you don't want is a trivial 'feel-good' agreement on vague principles that leads to no action. Make no mistake: these processes are ultimately about who gets what. Their real genius lies in discovering that different sides can each get what they need, that the pie can be artfully cut so as to be bigger than we thought. This is known in the facilitation business as going from OR to AND. We stop saying fish or irrigation, jobs or wildlife and we start saying fish and irrigation, jobs and wildlife. From that change, everything else flows.

Finally, such a process must have as its goal some deep and permanent solution. It must, in the words of Donald Snow of the Northern Lights Foundation, "break through the shallow façade of rhetoric and reach to the heart of the issue." Only then, when people are united despite their differences by hard-earned trust, does the astounding political power of such a process become effective.

Having said all that, I should emphasize that cooperative decision-making processes are by no means panaceas for every environmental problem. They are extremely difficult to bring off, frustrating to participate in, often lengthy, often grueling for their members, and they can easily fail. They can fail, for example, when short-term economic interests overwhelm all other factors. Regional land-use planning efforts that call for some property owners to be deprived of a significant fraction of the value of their holdings - with no compensation - are in this class. They can fail also, as I suggested, when one advocacy group believes it can get more in some other place than it can in the cooperative process. This happened, for example, when Washington state attempted to extend the forestry commission process I mentioned earlier to the entire state. It was, unfortunately, an election year and one interest group thought it could get a better deal from the incoming administration, so the effort collapsed.

And we should also remember that this movement toward cooperative decision-making is growing in poisoned soil. Throughout the nation, among the national environmental groups and industry associations, there are talented, dedicated people who have been trained in a tradition of combat, accustomed to fight for total victory in pursuit of deeply-held beliefs. They like going to court. They will not easily yield their historic leadership or work in good faith with traditional enemies. Does this mean that cooperative efforts are doomed? No, for ultimately, in my view, American pragmatism will prevail. If cooperative processes are seen to work over the long run, if they really free us from the tyranny of the either-or, if neither side feels co-opted, if they continue to yield creative solutions that allow the extraction of livelihood from natural resources while at the same time preserving environmental values, then they will establish a permanent place among our civic institutions.

Meanwhile, the consensus approach is starting to trickle back through the Beltway. We can detect signs at the national level that the paladins of the adversary approach are exhausted, and, more significantly, that the people are tired of watching the warriors squabbling while important public business goes undone. The aftermath of the recent election suggests to me that the usual promises of the victors to work together across partisan lines are not entirely ritualistic. Some great issues can only be resolved across the lines of party and particular interest. Sometimes it does happen that a window for cooperative progress opens, and that may be one of the messages sent by the electorate in returning a split government to Washington. We don't much care what you call yourselves - just get together and solve these big problems.

On the administrative level, some parts of the federal government are saying to parties in contention over proposed regulatory efforts, 'If you don't want us feds stomping through your garden with our heavy boots, settle your differences and make a recommendation!' The Food and Drug Administration, for example, has the drug industry and consumer advocates working on a consensus plan to establish regulations for what information has to be supplied to people buying prescription drugs, something the federal government has been trying to do without success for 15 years. The threat is that if they do not come up with an adequate plan, the FDA will go ahead with conventional regulation.

With respect to EPA itself, we see that recent reports from both the National Science Council and the Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management recommend bringing the public into the very earliest stages of the process by which the EPA establishes risk. Over the past half-dozen years the EPA has also largely transformed its relationship with the states. Instead of focusing on paper compliance with the various program delegations, EPA has shifted substantial resources to collaborative processes to solve high-priority local problems. This is an abandonment of EPA's historic one-size-fits-all approach to one that emphasizes joint setting of goals, an increase in public involvement, and a lot more program flexibility than has been the case in the past. Program evaluation is more and more based on tracking of actual environmental results, rather than just tabulating bureaucratic procedures.

If this trend continues, American public administrators will find themselves in an unfamiliar world. Historically, public administration has prided itself on its ability to apply the tools of rationality to complex social problems in accordance with some statutory charter and come up with a decision. I think that in the future, many such decisions will, rather, emerge from the sort of group processes I have been talking about, wherever the decisions are at the appropriate scale. The role of the public administrator here will be largely to foster the process and make sure that it has adequate technical support. This may be a troubling change for some, but you have to ask yourselves whether it isn't preferable to spending more time in public administration hell - that is, sitting in front of some high-school auditorium with a crowd calling you the spawn of Satan while the TV cameras roll.

And, if the trend continues, we may one day observe an upward virtuous spiral, where trust engenders success and satisfaction with government actions, which in turn creates higher levels of trust and makes government actions either less necessary or easier to accomplish. Here it's important to recall that democracy is not just a way of electing the personnel of government. If that was all it was, then on the evidence of some aspects of the recent campaign, it might not have lasted. Instead, the real virtue of democracy is that it is a school. In it we learn how to manage the public aspects of our lives, and thus, unlike any other system of government, it is progressive - we can actually get better at it as time goes on. And it is a hard school. When we doze off, as we will inevitably do from time to time, we get a sharp rap on the knuckles. When we pay attention, we earn the gold stars, one of which is the restoration of trust between government and people. Thomas Jefferson once pointed out that if the people appeared not enlightened enough to exercise their control of government, the solution was not to take away the control but to "inform their discretion by education." The cooperative processes that are springing up around the country are doing just that, giving to large numbers of citizens a new comprehension of the complexity involved in government decisions, out of which has got to come a heightened appreciation of, and tolerance for, the necessary work of government. If these processes work, if they spread, if they become an indispensable part of government at all levels, we may take it as a sign that we, as a people, have moved up a grade in democracy's school. It holds out the hope that, eventually, the United States will be ready for self-government.