OMB vs. EPA

I spent several years working at the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Among other things, OMB produces the President’s budget request every year. People often ask me to compare OMB and the Environmental Protection Agency. I like to start by comparing their cultures. As a policy official at OMB, it’s a bit like being surrounded by a pack of eager Labrador Retrievers. They have one goal in life: to make you happy. Indeed, they need to make you happy. “Throw a stick, throw a stick! Please, please throw a stick so I can bring it back to you!!”

In contrast, EPA is a Quaker meeting. There’s less hierarchy. Everyone gets in a circle and has their say. There’s a strong desire for consensus. Everyone wants to hear what the decision is and why the decision was made the way it was.

Fortunately, these two cultures match up well to their respective missions. OMB crunches numbers on the White House campus. It needs to be incredibly responsive and reliable. EPA operates in a miasma of science, philosophy, economics, and law that sometimes borders on the reconciliation of religious beliefs. That can require a lot of meetings and process to work through.

I love both organizations. The drive at OMB to reach rational and quantifiable solutions to difficult problems under tight time constraints satisfied the “A”-type personality in me. The 500 folks at OMB routinely produce more and higher quality work than much larger organizations. What about EPA?

I love EPA because the mission of the agency touches something deep inside most people who work here. It’s why they come and why they stay. And I get that.

I’ve had three ‘environmental epiphanies’ in my life. My first one was the visceral revelation of a boy reacting to an outdoor experience on a frozen lake. My second epiphany came about two years later. No frozen landscape this time. I wasn’t even outside. I was reading a book. In 11th grade our English teacher assigned us The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley.

Eiseley was a revelation. He fully grasped the emotional response I’d had - and never shared with anyone - two years before. He understood my fascination with the complexity, timelessness, and immensity of nature. For instance, in an essay called “The Flow of the River” he describes floating, on his back, down the Platte as it flows from the Rockies, through Nebraska, to the Gulf of Mexico:

The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent. It was then I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth . . . was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea.

That still makes me tingle.

This was an intellectual discovery. Here was someone who had put my feelings into words. I didn’t have to pursue my relationship with nature solely on a hiking trail. I could also do it from an armchair.

Or a desk.

Every day I show up at EPA part of me selfishly works on my continuing desire to reconcile the relationship of man and nature.

It’s not all selfish, of course. Eiseley also wrote:

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with the sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

I have been extremely fortunate. Three times in my life, I’ve experienced epiphanies. And while I crave another, what is more important is that my children have the opportunity to experience such a miraculous escape. Now, there’s a good reason to go to work in the morning.

Comments

[Steven Falk]

Using the Spinal Tap measure-ometer of your blog postings, Marcus, this one is an eleven.

[Jim Williams]

Great blog - but what was the third epiphany?

[Marcus]

I've still got to write up the third epiphany. I do have a title: "The Needles."

[Marcus]

I understand a few folks at OMB are not happy because I equated them to Labs. Think of the best aspects of a Lab and that's what I meant. Think of all the bad aspects of a Lab, that's not what I meant.

By the way, you got any extra money lying around for '08?

[Alex]

What about the terrible waste that happens here? How do you avoid thinking about that? I see it everywhere. It drains my joy away. Most people in the EPA aren't environmentalists, they're just career bureaucrats wasting their time until they retire. I hate to rant about this, but how do I keep wanting to work here?

[Marcus]

Alex, What waste are you talking about? If you want you can email me directly.

Marcus