“Everything has a price”: Jimmy Carter and the Struggle for Balance in Federal Regulatory Policy

On Thursday morning, December 11, 1980, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, President Jimmy Carter signed into law two bills that stood for the multifaceted legacy he wanted for his departing administration.

One of the measures, the “Superfund” law, created a new funding mechanism to facilitate the cleanup of the nation’s hazardous waste sites. The Superfund bill filled a “major gap in the existing laws of our country,” strengthening the hand of federal environmental regulators, Carter said that day. The second bill, the Paperwork Reduction Act, appeared to point in the opposite direction. The Paperwork Reduction Act aimed to “eliminate unnecessary Federal regulations” as well as “wasteful and unnecessary” federal information requirements. The law, Carter declared, would “regulate the regulators” by giving the White House Office of Management and Budget “the final word” on regulations.¹

A few months after the signing ceremony, with Carter out of office, a pitched battle began between liberal environmentalists and conservative antiregulatory activists. Superfund and the Office of Management and Budget’s control over federal regulation were central to the conflict. The fledgling Reagan administration zealously embraced its new powers over federal regulation. With a publicly combative tone, the Office of Management and Budget provoked outcry by trying to sharply curtail environmental, health, and safety regulations. Meanwhile, congressional liberals and the White House fought over the implementation of Superfund, ultimately leading to the resignation of Reagan’s first EPA administrator and the perjury conviction of her assistant administrator in charge of the toxic-waste program.

This was decidedly not the legacy that Carter intended. He had offered a different vision from this bitter strife between environmentalists and deregulators. Rather than forcing a choice between starkly different paths, the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Superfund bill represented, for Carter, two important developments of the 1970s that were compatible and should be merged.

Threats to public health, safety, and the environment demanded a governmental response. Ten years earlier, on New Years Day 1970, Richard Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act, declaring that it was “now or never” for Americans to “restore the cleanliness” of the nation’s air and water. In the decade between NEPA and Superfund, Congress passed the major environmental bills of the era, addressing air and water pollution, toxic chemicals, oil pollution, endangered species, forest and marine management, and energy efficiency. Federal agencies, including the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), sprang into action to write and enforce new rules and regulations. Superfund turned out to be the last major building block in this emerging federal environmental regulatory state.²

Yet as the federal government expanded its reach during the 1970s, many critics, particularly business leaders but also, increasingly, academic economists and policymakers, complained about the impact of regulations on the American people and on the nation’s economic growth. New York Republican Frank Horton, one of the paperwork bill’s House sponsors, reported being “besieged” in his district with complaints of “strangulation by regulation.” Regulation and paperwork were not free goods, these critics argued. The government needed to manage the costs that it imposed on the American people.³

Carter himself embodied both of these impulses: he embraced government action to protect the environment and public health, and he also sought to make regulation less burdensome and costly. Both causes, in fact, were personal passions. Carter had spent childhood days roaming the woods and fields in rural Georgia. “Everyone who knows me,” he said while signing the Superfund bill, “understands that one of my greatest pleasures has been to strengthen the protection of our environment.” But government efficiency also animated the president. With a background in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, Carter was used to calculating and balancing risks and benefits for strategic purposes. As governor of Georgia, Carter also had worked to rationalize state government, abolishing and consolidating hundreds of state agencies. Now in the closing days of his presidency, Carter spoke fondly of the utterly bureaucratic cause of information management and regulatory reform. One...