Worldandnation: Carol Browner's future yet to be decided

Carol Browner's future yet to be decided

By CRAIG PITTMAN

Eight years ago, when a new president nominated Carol Browner to run the Environmental Protection Agency, she carried her kindergarten-age son in her arms. Now Zachary is in high school and his mom is out of a job. Too bad, the teenager told her.

"I liked your job," he told Browner, 45. "It was a good thing you did."

Today marks the end of Browner's tenure as the longest-serving administrator in the history of the nation's largest regulatory agency. Her time at the helm of EPA was marred by battles with Congress, accusations she politicized the agency and complaints she failed do enough to clean up contaminated sites like Stauffer Chemical near Tarpon Springs.

But she also notched major victories in fighting air pollution and repairing the Everglades -- the last a longtime personal priority for the Miami native.

Once touted as a possible U.S. Senate candidate, Browner said this week she has not yet decided what to do when she walks out of her office for the last time. She does not even know whether she will stay in Washington or return to Florida.

"I guess I'll find out Saturday," she joked.

This is a rare sputter in a career that for more than a decade has soared like a rocket.

Browner was born to Irish immigrant parents, both community college teachers. She likes to tell how "when I was growing up, the Everglades were my back yard," and recalls spending "summer evenings marveling at the towering clouds off in the distance, which we called Florida's mountains."

After earning a law degree from the University of Florida, Browner worked for an organization helping poor women, then as a legislative staffer in Tallahassee. That led to a job with then-U.S. Sen. Lawton Chiles, and later with then-Sen. Al Gore.

When Chiles became governor, he brought Browner back to run a state environmental agency. She became known as a tough negotiator and an innovative regulator. After Bill Clinton won the White House, she was tapped to head up EPA.

A Wall Street Journal editorial called her the "most troubling Clinton pick," because she "invariably plumps for the most extreme regulatory approach."

When she took over the EPA in January 1993, Browner recalled, "I found a backward, technical agency." EPA employees were so focused on debating parts-per-billion issues that they missed what she considered the big picture of environmental protection: protecting the public's air, water and food.

Whether the EPA was banning the popular pesticide Dursban or suing Tampa Electric Co. over pollution violations, Browner repeatedly invoked the public's health as justification. Often she emphasized children's health as her paramount concern, even creating an Office of Children's Health Protection.

But protecting public health can be expensive. Industry complained that Browner failed to take into account the cost of complying with tough rules.

She wound up on a collision course with Republicans in Congress who were trying to roll back regulations as part of their "Contract with America." They tried to slash the EPA's budget, limit its authority and force the agency to put economic costs ahead of health concerns.

Asked this week to name low points in her EPA tenure, Browner said her run-ins with Congress were "pretty rough." When House Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas called the EPA "the Gestapo of government," she said, "That was harsh."

Browner usually enjoyed strong backing from her boss, despite grumbling from some White House aides that she should be fired for insubordination for refusing to compromise on air pollution issues. But when Clinton met with his Cabinet to apologize for lying to them about his affair with a White House intern, Browner told him plainly that she had a tough time explaining to her son what he had done.

Browner's focus on family led her to shun the Washington party circuit, instead devoting time to her son and her husband, Michael Podhorzer, who works for the AFL-CIO. She said she "missed the occasional ballgame, but never a school play."

For a while Browner was a media darling, listed by George as one of the 20 most fascinating women in politics and even named Woman of the Year by Glamour. But now her star has cooled. One mentor, Chiles, is dead, and the other, Gore, was defeated last year. Her replacement, New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman, told senators this week that she thinks all environmental regulations should be subjected to strict cost-benefit tests.

"I hope she will preserve all of what we've achieved the last eight years," Browner said. "I think I'm leaving her a solid work to build on."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.