Striding into the Energy Department on his first day on the job, Dan Reicher understood instantly that he was entering the belly of the beast.
For 10 years Reicher, an anti-nuclear environmental lawyer, had fought the department’s bureaucracy, challenging its secretive nuclear weapons complex not only in courtrooms but also in the arena of public opinion, the columnnists’ pages of the nation’s newspapers.
Now as he walked unrecognized along a corridor toward his new office, he overheard one indignant bureaucrat grumbling to another, “Can you believe that Reicher is now in the building?”
Not only is he in the James Forrestal Building, the headquarters named after the first secretary of defense, but Reicher is responsible for running much of it as deputy chief of staff and counselor to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary.
Reicher is part of an intriguing species, the outsider-turned-insider. He’s one among scores of activists who have become policymakers. These neo-insiders wield great power in nearly every area of government, even if their names are largely unknown to the public.
A good number spent their entire professional lives fighting government, but they are the mirror-opposite of the Reagan revolutionaries: These are the people who believe government is part of the solution, not the problem.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader remains the quintessential government outsider, and he scorns many of the new insiders as hypocrites. But Ann Brown, head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Reid Wilson, a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, also were “bomb throwers” who tested and taunted government to be bolder and more concerned.
Now they are hitched to the yoke of responsibility, dealing with special interests and recalcitrant bureaucracies, simultaneously challenged and frustrated by congressional delays and the day-to-day burdens of running the operations they once criticized.
J. Davit McAteer, an attorney and former unionist who sued the Mine Safety and Health Administration over lack of enforcement, today runs it and has complained of being stymied by the agency’s holdover Republicans. Maria Echaveste, a former migrant worker, oversees the Labor Department division that deals with migrants but has found that budget realities make it impossible to hire the inspectors she really needs.
In his high-ceiling suite in the Old Executive Office Building, Gordon Adams looks like a thousand other number-crunching bureaucrats. His slicked-back, salt-and-pepper hair is neatly combed, his shirt is pressed and his papers are spread out across a table.
Only his tie-featuring a panda romping through a field of golden wheat-didn’t quite fit the image of someone consolidating his power in an important White House job.
Before being hired as associate director for national security and international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, Adams for 10 years ran the Defense Budget Project, a small think tank that kept a close eye on the 1980s defense buildup and often challenged Pentagon spending plans. With a doctorate in political science and a resume that included teaching at Rutgers and Columbia Universities, the 52-year-old Adams had never before worked in government.
Looking back, he wistfully refers to his think tank days as “a life of luxury,” when he and his staff of 10 produced a brief analytic paper every two to three weeks and major studies two or three times yearly.
In his OMB job, even though he has a staff of 60, one of the hardest adjustments has been that “you don’t have much time for reflecting. The hardest thing in government is to find time to think.”
“Things move very fast, and everything’s short-term. At a think tank, you can opine, and of course you don’t have to implement anything. When you get into government, you have to implement everything. And it’s a much more baroque process than you would expect.’
But is the presence of outsiders-turned-insiders a testament to Democratic government or, as some skeptics claim, a clever attempt to co-opt dissent?
“The (Clinton) administration uses these people to take on or counter whatever citizens group they came from,” says Lori Wallach, a Public Citizen attorney, who describes most of the former outsiders as “marionettes” for the administration.
Clearly, some face recriminations from longtime allies. Before taking a job with the White House communications office, Michael Waldman was director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, a self-described public advocacy group affiliated with Nader. In that role, he teamed with Nader to write an article in the New Republic assailing the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement.
Last year, Waldman was assigned to the White House’s NAFTA war room to push the trade deal. That pitted him directly against many former colleagues at Public Citizen, which was among NAFTA’s most zealous opponents.
Wallach went so far as to publicly attack Waldman, noting that she still has a portion of the Waldman-Nader article taped to her office wall.
“When you look at those folks in those jobs, you can come to only two conclusions: Their heart is not in it, or they have no principles,” Wallach said. “It’s like having your sibling run away from home at wartime. And then they turn up again, they have switched sides and are opening fire on your house.”
Waldman brushed off the comments as hyperbole, but they seem to have left him bruised. Nonetheless, Wallach says the former outsiders “know what . . . the next strategic move by the opposition will be. So, it does work.”
Nader himself is dismissive of the current resident of the White House-he calls him “George Ronald Clinton”-and he chastises the administration for its “continued non-enforcement of health and safety laws.”
With the exception of Dr. David Kessler, the head of the Food and Drug Administration and a Bush appointee, Nader describes the federal regulatory apparatus as “still pretty moribund.”
Still, it’s clear that things are being accomplished from within.
As an outsider, Reicher had struggled-with only marginal success-to bring openness and accountability to one of the most secret corners of the Energy Department. Now he is responsible for a sizeable chunk of the department’s $18 billion budget for the nation’s complex of nuclear weapons factories, laboratories and test sites.
With O’Leary’s backing, he launched an effort to go public with information the department had kept secret for decades: The history of radiation experiments on humans, the record of undisclosed underground nuclear tests, the quantities of plutonium in government stockpiles, the environmental legacy of the nation’s bombmaking plants.
Those moves grabbed headlines. But other significant changes are less visible.
For instance, O’Leary has drawn on Reicher’s old enviromental allies in making decisions about issues such as halting nuclear weapons testing and developing alternative energy technologies. And his solid environmental credentials have helped bridge the chasm of distrust with the people living near DOE weapons plants after years of deception about radiation exposure.
“The culture at DOE has definitely changed, which I think is one of the great successes,” said Thomas Cochran, a former Reicher colleague at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The DOE bureacracy hasn’t immediately embraced the new direction, particularly the cutbacks at the nuclear weapons labs and production facilities.
“One of the more poignant sides of this is how you deal sensitively with folks who have devoted literally their careers to work that just isn’t part of the mission anymore,” Reicher said.
Reicher, 38, traces his environmentalist roots to the 1970 Earth Day activities he organized at his high school in Syracuse, N.Y. He was a biology major at Dartmouth, and his first job was with the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Miles Island in 1979: He ran the copying machine. After law school at Stanford, he practiced environmental law in the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.
Reid Wilson acknowledges that as EPA director of public liaison, his job is to stay in touch with the environmental activists he worked with for more than four years at the Sierra Club, where he was political director. But he disputes charges that former advocates have been co-opted.
A Washington veteran at age 34, Wilson said he has no regrets about the move, even when he has to tell former colleagues about policies that are not always what they want.
Recently, Wilson participated in meetings to develop a congressionally mandated rule that car and truck manufacturers install canisters, beginning with 1998 vehicles, to trap gasoline vapors during refueling.
“I felt all of a sudden that we were deciding how the automobile will be manufactured,” he recalled. He said it was one of his most satisfying moments at the EPA.
The Jan. 24 rule, which was opposed by the EPA under the Bush and Reagan administrations, will reduce air pollution, but it also was a compromise from what environmentalists wanted.
“They wanted the trucks to be covered sooner, but we came up with getting more trucks covered,” says Wilson, who still plays on the Sierra Club’s softball team.
Kerry Scanlon was awed simply by the size of the Justice Department’s headquarters and its 1,800 personnel when he became one of two deputies to Deval Patrick, the South Side Chicago native who heads the civil rights division.
Scanlon had spent five years as an assistant counsel in the Washington office of the NAACP Legal & Educational Fund Inc., a pioneer in the civil rights movement. For 10 years before that, he was an attorney and project director at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
Like the 43-year-old Scanlon, dozens of civil rights lawyers who worked on the sidelines during the Republican years, are now scattered throughout the Clinton administration in key policymaking posts at Education, Transportation and Health and Human Services.
Scanlon hopes to correct what he feels are restrictive rulings by the Supreme Court. During the Reagan administration-and to a lesser extent the Bush years-he said, the Justice Department’s leadership “actively engaged in an attempt to turn back the clock in civil rights.”
Meanwhile, Ellen Haas labors at the Agriculture Department to get American schoolchildren to eat less fat and more produce.
The need for healthier school meals is an issue Haas knew firsthand from her days as an outspoken consumer advocate who often criticized the federal government for not doing more to improve the healthfulness and wholesomeness of the nation’s food supply.
Now, the Agriculture Department’s assistant secretary for food and consumer services, Haas recently unveiled the first nutritional overhaul of the government’s school lunch program in its 50-year history. The program aims to limit fat to 30 percent of calories and saturated fat to 10 percent.
One of her first priorities was to cut through the bureaucratic thinking that left school menus out of whack with modern nutritional guidelines. But as she tried to incorporate those guidelines into school menus, she quickly learned that having a vision didn’t guarantee instant results.
“Change doesn’t come just because you have a great idea,” she said.
Designing changes to fit the needs of the 92,000 schools in the program was such an enormous task that one skeptical cafeteria worker warned her: “It’s a great idea, Ellen, but you’re going to have to go kitchen by kitchen.”
“One thing that surprises me is how slow things move,” Haas said. “When you make something a priority, it can move fast. But then you have 98 other things that are also very important, and they take forever.
“You can’t make everything a priority. So that’s very frustrating. If you were a gadfly, you could make a lot of news. But that doesn’t mean you’d have lasting results.”
Ann Brown, another prominent former consumer activist, has taken over as head of the five-member Consumer Product Safety Commission. Now, says an aide to Rep. Cardiss Collins (D-Ill.), chair of the House Consumer Protection Subcommittee, “the hope is that Congress won’t have to micromanage issues.”
During the Bush administration, the aide said, many lawmakers concluded the only way to get action was for Congress to step in and enact laws, for instance, on bicycle helmets and toy safety.
Brown, dubbed “the mother of toy safety,” had worked for Americans for Democratic Action and each year just before Christmas she issued a list of the most unsafe toys on the market.
The product safety commission, says Kristen Rand, counsel for Consumers Union, now is “1,000 percent more active.” She cites such recent moves as the quick recall of foreign crayons after they were found to contain traces of lead and to the jawboning of juvenile clothing manufacturers into eliminating drawstrings that could choke children.
“She set the tone there and made the others (the Bush appointees) want to not look like they’re sitting there doing nothing,” said Rand.
Says newly minted insider Brown: “I smile on the consumer groups. They are our eyes and ears in a way. They can tell us what we need to do.”
