administrator of the EPA remains the bureaucratic inferior of the heads of the Cabinet departments, putting environmental interests at a disadvantage in the normal government give-and-take (Train, 1990, p. 7).
In other words, it was time for a formal acknowledgment of what was already a fact of public policy, in the form of advocacy on behalf not only of the environment but of the federal bureaucracy's intimate role in the administration of the environment. The EPA's impact on the whole of American life could be recognized on an institutional level for the reason that its practical impact was already well established. Creating a Department of the Environment would give a name to a bureaucratic structure that was more or less already in existence.
But the limitations of naming something whose authentic structure was more apparent than real had also emerged since 1960, and were to arise dramatically throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. In this regard, Alm (1990) views the principal benefit of creation of a Department of the Environment as symbolic in.nature, to the degree acknowledgment of the need to regulate the environment would involve raising the stakes of such issues as pollution control. In the recent past, however, there has been little presidential support for either raising the stakes of such issues or for the creation of a major federal bureaucracy to address such issues. Further to this point, the fact that no cabinet office has ever actually been abolished argues that any cabinet-level bureaucracy so created would be permanent in nature. The enlargement of the federal bureaucracy,, on this view, would represent a step backward in the efforts of those who have a reputation for favoring the downsizing of the role of government in issues of public policy.
The theoretical view of the Department of the Environment as a symbolic rather than practical creation was made clear in the presidential election of 198...