By David Kurlander
The Senate last week passed by an 89-2 vote the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act, which provides $35 billion for state water quality programs. The Act, the first major federal water safety legislation since the Flint water crisis began in 2014, united a fractious Senate and gave Democrats an opportunity to push for President Biden’s ambitious—and far more contested—$1.9 trillion infrastructure bill. “We’re trying to work in a bipartisan way whenever we can — and this bill is a classic example,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor following the vote. The ancestor of the recently passed legislation, the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), came at another moment of attempted bipartisanship, even as bitter disagreements over the appropriate regulatory role of government reached a fever pitch.
The SDWA emerged as part of the larger push for environmental protections that accompanied the rise of the Environmental Protection Agency, which President Nixon created in 1970. In addition to the impact of tracts like Rachel Carson’s iconic anti-pesticide tome Silent Spring, a series of visible environmental catastrophes—including a massive January 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara and a fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland five months later—helped hasten the agency’s creation.
Nixon enlisted the help of his close advisor Roy Ash, who was in the midst of overseeing a larger “executive reorganization,” to look into crafting an environmental agency. In April 1970, the so-called Ash Council advised the creation of a 6,000-person organization. A flurry of legislation followed: a beefed-up Clean Air Act, a nationwide ban on DDT, and the 1972 Clean Water Act, which regulated pollution in lakes and rivers.
Strangely, however, both Nixon and Ash were deeply uncomfortable with the growth of the agency they created. Both men were passionately pro-business. Ash had come to the White House after co-founding Litton Industries, a conglomerate of defense firms and an early popularizer of the microwave oven. The EPA’s first Administrator, William Ruckelshaus, learned quickly to work with White House aide John Ehrlichman rather than risking Nixon’s passionate defenses of corporate freedom. “Ehrlichman realized Nixon would react negatively to anything that smacked of regulation, that would interfere with the economy, or, in a narrow sense, would arouse some of the captains of industry, whom the president admired tremendously,” Ruckelshaus recalled. By 1972, Nixon had become a formal block to much of the legislation—Congress had to override his veto of the Clean Water Act.
In 1973, Ash—who had advised the creation of the Office of Management and Budget—became the agency’s third director. From this post, he continued to limit the regulatory reach of the EPA, staying out of the Watergate scandal that was starting to fell his colleagues (including Ruckelshaus, who had moved to the DOJ and resigned during the Saturday Night Massacre rather than follow Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox).
Environmentalist Senators had for years been trying to address substandard drinking water, particularly after a 1969 study found that 36% of Americans were consuming potentially dangerous supply. In March 1973, the issue hit the front pages when a bacterial outbreak in tony Miami Beach’s supply required residents to boil their water until the Air Force could fly two massive chlorinator tanks into town.
In June, Washington Senator Warren Magnuson introduced the Safe Drinking Water Act. “Maggie” had long been the Senate’s leader in consumer rights, working alongside advocate Ralph Nader in the late 1960s to push for traffic safety, accuracy in advertising, and warnings for harmful products like cigarettes. Magnuson’s proposal gave the EPA broad latitude to set national water quality standards and to step in when states weren’t following the rules.
Nixon and Ash countered with their own proposal, which kept the new national water quality standards but eliminated much of the EPA’s authority to supersede the states in the event of a suspected violation. Nixon made his opposition to Magnuson’s plan public in his January 1974 State of the Union address, arguing that the legislation would “require unnecessary federal standards on operating treatment plants, generate a domineering federal enforcement role, and create several new categorical subsidy programs.”
Over the course of 18 months, congressional committees held intense hearings about the Act. During an early Senate Commerce Committee meeting, Nader appeared as a witness and made things personal when he invoked the possibility that Louisiana Senator Russell Long could be affected by New Orleans’ particularly bad drinking water: “One doesn’t know the effect of these compounds on Senator Long or other people in Louisiana who have been drinking these contaminated waters, but we certainly better find out.”
After the Senate overwhelmingly approved the SDWA, Republican New York Representative James Hastings railed against what he saw as governmental overreach in a 1974 House hearing, saying, “Every time we open up a water tap in every house in the United States of America, we will find an EPA inspector coming out of that water tap.”
Nixon was in no condition to more actively join the battle—he resigned in August 1974. Ash, however, stayed on as budget czar and began lobbying newly-inaugurated President Ford to oppose Magnuson’s plan.
As the Act picked up steam in the Fall, Ash wrote an open letter to Senate Minority Leader John Rhodes claiming that the plan would “result in federal regulation of every aspect of over 40,000 local water treatment plants” and would make state and local government “near caretakers for the bureaucracy in Washington.” He also wrote a series of missives and memos to Ford asking for him to strike down the Act, but also acknowledging, “The ease with which a veto here can be turned against you is obvious.”
The House passed the SDWA in November. Despite a final veto push by Ash, Ford ultimately deferred to the second EPA administrator, Russell Train, who pushed the Act’s passage. The generally conservative Rhodes, a Ford golf buddy whose reluctant, late abandonment of Nixon months before had played a central role in the former President’s resignation, also agreed to get on board. On December 17th, 1974, Ford signed the SWDA, praising the “strong bill” while offering a word of caution about the EPA’s direct involvement: “I intend that it be administered so as to minimize both Federal involvement and costs.”
The day after Ford signed the Act, Roy Ash announced his resignation as Budget Director. Meanwhile, Administrator Train quickly set to work delivering chlorine to particularly polluted water supplies and began distributing $125 million to help states implement the new standards.
Congress amended the SDWA during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, triggering further battles over the role of the EPA and the federal government in pushing states to follow the evolving standards for water quality. Now, with new water legislation in the books and the larger infrastructure fight gearing up, the regulatory battles of the early 1970s are returning to the fore.
For more on the battles over the SDWA, head to the Ford Presidential Library’s digital collections, which house a number of digitized folders showcasing the back-and-forth between Ash and congress over the Act.
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