The midpoint in the first Administration of President George W. Bush brought with it several broad two-year reviews of Administration environmental policies by environmental reporters working with national and regional news organizations.

The report cards are decidedly mixed, and they likely play better among environmental activists than they do Administration loyalists.

Seth Borenstein, Knight-Ridder, Washington, D.C. bureau, wrote one of the more comprehensive reviews for the San Jose Mercury News and led with the administration having “significantly altered the nation’s environmental policies, often without attracting much notice.”

The Administration “has slipped a number of major policy changes under the public’s and the media’s radar by quietly issuing executive orders that don’t require congressional approval, making announcements late on Fridays, rewriting highly technical environmental regulations and muzzling dissent within the Administration,” Borenstein reported. He said a sampling of opinion from more than three dozen environmental and business experts pointed to more than 50 major policy changes.

Environmental activists call the Bush record “deplorable,” Borenstein reported, with business interests, conservative think tanks, and Administration officials characterizing the Bush changes as “refreshing innovation while cutting back excessive regulation.” He quotes White House Press Officer Scott McClellan who points to “a new way of thinking that is results-oriented” and defends the Bush Administration’s approach as based on “working on a cooperative way …Environmental protection and economic growth can go hand in hand.”

Borenstein reports in his January 18 piece that the Clinton Administration “issued a flurry of environmental regulations that some considered booby traps for Bush” and that the new Administration was forced to consider early whether to repeal, reduce, or ignore them.

The New York Times’ two-year review was published more than a month later, in a February 23 piece bylined by Douglas Jehl of the Times’ Washington bureau.

“For two years, it has come in bursts,” Jehl’s piece led, but over time the President “has imposed a distinctive stamp on a vast landscape of issues affecting air, water, land, energy and the global climate.”

Jehl characterizes the Bush Administration’s two-year effort as reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s: “It seeks to tie environmental protection to other goals that are not always complementary, like economic growth, protection from regulation, increased energy production and deference to local control.”

Jehl quotes Council on Environmental Quality Chair James L. Connaughton as saying the Administration’s approach “is to maximize the quality of life for America.”

“That means balancing the environmental equation with the natural resource equation, the social equation and the economic equation,” said Connaughton.

Jehl reports that much of what the Administration has done in its first two years “has the potential to be far-reaching,” including rethinking laws and regulatory programs going back 30 years. As did Borenstein, Jehl reports that “many of these policies are being put into effect not by changing laws but through the less visible realm of regulation.” He says both Democratic and Republican critics warn of “a significant retreat” under the guise of environment-friendly sounding titles.

Despite Administration efforts to wrap their initiatives in green-sounding labels, “the disconnect between this Administration’s claims and those of its critics has been particularly profound,” Jehl reports. Actually measuring impacts in terms of improved or degraded air or water quality is difficult, he reports, “On that score, the picture is not yet clear” and may not be for some time.

One of the more innovative two-year reviews came in a publication with a noticeably smaller audience than The New York Times or Knight-Ridder’s chain, but with an audience generally regarded to be quite influential in “inside the Beltway” political and policy areas.

National Journal, in its January 25 issue, assigned “grades” to the President’s official and unofficial Cabinet members, the “unofficial” to include EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. The magazine said it was motivated by its impression that several high-profile Cabinet secretaries -- Defense, Justice, Attorney General -- are well known through constant visibility, but that others are “outside the spotlight.”

The magazine evaluated their performance using four criteria:

• influence within the Bush Administration on their issues;
• “clout” on Capitol Hill;
• success in helping the President politically; and
• management of their agencies or departments.

National Journal Editor Charles Green emphasized that the grades “should not be viewed as an endorsement or rejection of the policies of a Cabinet secretary. We looked at effectiveness, not ideology.”

The publication assigned a team of three reporters to each Cabinet post, and each team interviewed “upwards of 30 people” from the Administration, Capitol Hill, and various interest groups. They graded the Cabinet members and then “justified the grades to a panel of National Journal editors and reporters.

Some questions they asked of themselves and their sources:

• Why was this person picked for the job?
• What did the White House expect this person to bring to the post?
• Has the secretary lived up to expectations?
• What major challenges has the Cabinet secretary faced during his or her first two years in office?
• How has the secretary responded to those challenges?
• What does the secretary see as his or her main responsibilities?”

Among the principal environmental posts graded, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, whose department includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), earned a cumulative grade of A-. Interior Secretary Gail Norton earned an overall grade of B-, and EPA Administrator Whitman an overall grade of C-. Only departed Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, both with cumulative grades of D, received lower grades than Whitman.

This chart evaluates Evans, Norton, and Whitman with four criteria: