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of the Senators who testified, and to set up a new office of environ- 

 mental poUcy in the White House. Can you tell us what the rela- 

 tionship will be with the department, an EPA department, and 

 how this will work? This is a step that causes some raised eye- 

 brows, if you do away with CEQ. How is this going to relate to your 

 department? 



Ms. Browner. The office that the President has created is one 

 that will serve as a coordinating entity. There are many Federal 

 agencies that involve themselves in environmental issues, either di- 

 rectly or tangentially, and the office within the White House will 

 serve to bring those agencies together in a cooperative manner to 

 make sure that environmental issues are addressed on the front 

 end, not on the back end. I think it is an office that will allow this 

 sort of collegial discussion and debate and consensus-building to 

 take place. 



Chairman Glenn. Do you know whether the President intends 

 for there to continue to be an annual environmental report with 

 compiled data from other Federal agencies? 



Ms. Browner. I am not aware of whether the President intended 

 that to be continued. I would certainly think there is a role for 

 such a report and it is probably something, as a country, we would 

 want to see continued. 



Chairman Glenn. Yes. I am interested also in how you are going 

 to prioritize things, or if you have thought about this or you have a 

 group, or how you are going to do this within the agency. 



Obviously, we don't have enough money to do everything we 

 would like to do in EPA and particularly in the clean-up area, Su- 

 perfund. We cannot do all this at once, and so you come down to 

 considerations such as Senator Roth has addressed, and I have 

 joined him in this, in risk assessment legislation. How do you prior- 

 itize things; what the President talked about as sort of "outcomes 

 policy", how do you determine what is doable? 



You know, as an example, if we wanted to take all the places 

 where there is some nuclear contamination and return them to, 

 say, greenfield status so there is no danger, no radiation, that is a 

 big order. To do that, in some of these places, would cost hundreds 

 and hundreds of billions of dollars for one site for remediation in 

 that particular area, if you could even do it. So some of these areas 

 need different treatment. 



Now, you can clean up an awful lot of things with some of this 

 money if you prioritize things as to where the dollars are going to 

 go and maybe some of the toughest problems have to wait a little 

 while and sort of sit in place. 



How do you go about prioritizing or doing risk assessment? It 

 seems to me that is key, particularly in your department. 



Ms. Browner. Mr. Chairman, I absolutely agree with you on the 

 need to prioritize. I think there are several tools available to us 

 and to the Congress in making those sorts of priority decisions, risk 

 assessment being a very important one. 



I think we also need to work with the citizens of this country to 

 understand what they perceive to be the most important environ- 

 mental issues. We need to work with our State, local, and tribal 

 governments to understand what resources they can bring to bear, 

 what they think the priorities are. 



