Bush intervened in EPA’s ozone rules

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual, last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially had tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president’s order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid conflicting with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA’s past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

The dispute involved one of two distinct parts of the EPA’s ozone restrictions, the “public welfare” standard, which is designed to protect against long-term harm from high ozone levels. The other part is known as the “public health” standard, which sets a legal limit on how high ozone levels can be at any one time. The two standards were set at the same level Wednesday, but until Bush asked for a change, the EPA had planned to set the “public welfare” standard at a lower level.

The documents provided insight into how White House officials helped shape the new air-quality rules that, by law, are supposed to be decided by the EPA administrator.

The White House Office of Management and Budget questioned in a March 6 memo to the EPA why the second standard was needed. EPA officials answered in a letter that high ozone concentrations can cause “adverse effects on agricultural crops, trees in managed and unmanaged forests, and vegetation species growing in natural settings.”

The preamble to the new regulations alluded to this tug of war, stating there was a “robust discussion within the Administration of these same strengths and weaknesses” in setting the secondary standard. The preamble went on to say that the decision to make the two ozone limits identical “reflects the view of the Administration as to the most appropriate secondary standard.”

The effort to rewrite the language – on the day the agency faced a statutory deadline – forced EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to postpone at the last moment a scheduled news conference to announce the new rules. It finally took place at 6 p.m., five hours later than planned.

Under the Clear Air Act the federal government must re-examine every five years whether its ozone standards are adequate, and the rules that the EPA issued Wednesday will help determine the nation’s air quality for at least a decade.