Christine Todd Whitman: You look across the country where you have one-party governance. And things aren’t the way people would want them to be in the cities, in the states where you have that. It’s not a healthy place. It doesn’t give you the kind of options on solutions to problems because there will only be one way of looking at it through that party’s prism, not through the lens of what’s good for everybody. And so it’s just not where we should be as a nation.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman served two terms as governor of New Jersey before becoming the head administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003.

Since then, she’s continued to be active in both political reform and environmental causes. To list just a few of her organizational affiliations, she is the co-chair of both the States United Democracy Center and the Forward Party, vice chair of the Eisenhower Fellowships, board member of the World Food Program USA and president of the Whitman Strategy Group, an environmental consulting firm.

She’s also a Kettering Foundation senior fellow. As you can tell from that description, Whitman hasn’t slowed down since her time in public office. She’s the type of person who, when she sees a problem, rolls up her sleeves and tries to figure out how to solve it.

It doesn’t matter how big the problem is. Are you worried about climate change and world hunger? Well, so is Whitman. And she’s hard at work trying to address them.

One particular problem that has Whitman’s attention, in which I asked her about in this conversation, is how to make American democracy work for all of our citizens. How do we build governments that are competent, efficient and responsive to the public interest?

And what’s gone wrong that so many Americans don’t feel that they already have that? At the most basic level, democracy requires free and fair elections. Eligible voters need to be able to vote. And those votes need to be counted accurately.

One of the organizations that Whitman has founded, the States United Democracy Center, studies the American electoral system. It helps ensure that it’s operating fairly. States United also helps people understand what they need to know in order to successfully register to vote and cast a ballot and informs the public about why they can trust the results.

But a functional democracy requires more than just counting votes accurately. If voters don’t feel represented by either of the two major political parties or, worse, if they’re sorted and gerrymandered into districts where only one party can win, electoral security isn’t enough.

And Whitman has founded another organization that promotes pro-democracy reforms and attempts to provide voters with new options, the Forward Party. A functional democracy also requires a functional government with staff who have the necessary expertise to design and enforce technically complex processes and regulations.

As a former director of the EPA, Whitman also knows a lot about how political appointees need to be able to rely on career civil servants and non-partisan experts to provide objective research and advice.

These long-standing norms and ideals of federal government are under attack right now by the U.S. Supreme Court and by proposals like Project 2025. Whitman can help us understand which parts of our government are actually working well and how we can protect them.

Add it all up, and Christine Todd Whitman has the experience, the knowledge and the ambition to help us all understand what’s going wrong with American democracy and how we can make it stronger. Christine Todd Whitman, welcome to The Context.

Christine Todd Whitman: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Alex.

Alex Lovit: So there’s a lot of things that, from the outside at least, make political office look like a hard job to have. There’s long hours, low job security. Everyone’s mad at you all the time.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: The amount of money you need to raise in order to successfully run for office is much greater than the amount of money that—the salary that the position receives.

Christine Todd Whitman: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: So I look at this. And it looks like, wow, being a politician does not look like a good deal. So I’m wondering, you know, as someone who has been motivated to run for office, what motivated you? And what do you think motivates most politicians?

Christine Todd Whitman: I honestly think that the most politicians, at least they start out with—you want to make a difference. They want to make a positive difference. They see things that they believe they could change or need to be changed. And they believe in our system.

When I ran for governor, I ran because I saw that 350,000 businesses had left the state during the three years of my predecessor. And I thought we could do better than that. And I wanted to try.

So that’s where—I really think most politicians start from that point. It’s just that sometimes the trappings of office become such that that becomes more important to them than solving the problems. And we’ve allowed our two parties—just what our founding fathers warned us against—we’ve allowed them to get too powerful.

So right now, what they care about is the power, not the policy. And you see that over and over again where—I mean, look at what happened with the immigration bill. You had a bipartisan immigration bill where a lot of the Democrats gave up a lot on that. They didn’t get much out of it as far as what their specific changes that they wanted to see.

But it was bipartisan. It would have passed. And then, one person stepped up and said I want to use it for the campaign—not good for us if you solve this problem now. That’s just wrong. Real people are being hurt. It’s a real crisis in our country.

I see the other side too with environmentalists often—you want to solve the climate crisis. And yet, the other side—they raise money from showing how bad it is. Unfortunately, you get [ropes] and you get people—particularly people in public office where maintaining the power, maintaining the trappings of the office—it sounds good to be called congressman or senator or governor or councilman.

People like titles. They like the authority that supposedly comes with it. And that becomes more important to them than solving problems. And then, our parties have gotten to the point where they’ve got this fine-tuned where they are very controlling as to what candidates can say, what issues they can bring up.

I mean, back in 1997, after I’d won my reelection, I was asked to run for the U.S. Senate. And so I said, okay. I’ll go down and talk to them. And I went down and talked to the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. And I was told then, if I said one word about campaign finance reform, I wouldn’t get a penny out of them.

And that’s wrong. That’s why we’ve started the Forward Party to stop that kind of thing, to give people the opportunity to vote for candidates who will actually represent them, not a political party.

Alex Lovit: So I definitely want to get to the Forward Party and talk with you about that method of reforming politics. But before we get there, let’s dig in a little bit to what’s going wrong with the current system. You know, what are the problems that the Forward Party is trying to fix?

And I thought one way of getting to that would be I wanted to read you a couple of quotes that you’ve given and ask whether you think those still apply today.

Christine Todd Whitman: Sure.

Alex Lovit: So you were just talking about the problem of partisan polarization. In 2005 in your book, “It’s My Party Too”—so that’s almost two decades ago now—you wrote, “Throughout the course of American history, whichever party most closely identifies with the mainstream of political thought, which in the United States has always run down the middle of the road, tends to have been the most successful.

“That’s why, for most of the modern political era, the parties have sought to win elections by appealing to the broadest number of voters. Although each party has had its core constituency, moderates have usually held the key to victory.” Do you think that’s still true today?

Christine Todd Whitman: I do believe it. I believe it particularly when you look at the registration numbers across the country. The Republicans have 25 percent, the Democrats 24 percent and the independents 51 percent. Those are the people in the middle who are saying I can’t go along with this extremism on either side. I don’t like it. It doesn’t represent me. And I want another choice.

So I do. But I think—and I think I said in the book—that we give too much credit to the extremes. And we’re too afraid of them because they’ll vote. It’s back on us. When anybody says to me, “Well, how did we get here?” my first reaction is, “Look in the mirror. Did you vote? Did you vote in primaries?”

I mean, primary turnout has been, traditionally in this country, about 10 percent. That’s 10 percent of eligible voters taking the time to go to the polls. And they are the most partisan by definition. And they tend to be on the extremes, the most extreme on individual issues.

So then, when you get to the fall, people look at the ticket. And they say, “I don’t like either of my choices, so I’m not going to vote.” Well, that’s not the answer. That’s not the response to have. We’ve allowed it to get to the point where you now have—with redistricting and things, you have districts that are solidly one side or the other.

That’s why, of the 500,000 elective offices across the country, 70 percent of them in any given year are uncontested. And that’s just wrong. Every voter should have a choice. And it’s interesting, when you go into a state and you say that, they go, “Yeah. But that doesn’t happen here.”

And then, you say, “No. Actually, you have x percent of your legislature –” and they’re just shocked at how many of their representatives are not challenged at any time in the electoral process. And that’s because the parties have such strong control.

Alex Lovit: So is the story here that this is the victory of the parties over democracy? So if you’re saying the key to win elections—the general election is to moderate, to seek voters in the center and what’s preventing that from happening in our politics is these factors you’re talking about, that we have primary elections that drive us towards the extremes, that we have gerrymandering that makes district noncompetitive—is that how you understand the problem?

Christine Todd Whitman: That’s a good part of it. And we’ve gotten lazy. I mean, that’s the problem. You know, Richard Nixon called them the silent majority. Well, they can’t keep being silent. You know, they’ve got to get out because, understandably, when it comes to a general election, the candidates know that their base will come out.

You know, if you’re a Republican in a Republican district or a Democrat in a Democratic district, you know that base is going to come out. But you’re not sure that the centers will. You know the extremes will. The extremes always come out. Those are the ones that vote because they’re passionate, because they are so devoted to a particular set of issues or whatever it is.

They will vote. And the people in the center—I think the last chapter was a call for radical moderates. Moderates tend to just think everything will work out. And no. Right now, that’s not the case. We have got to get involved.

Alex Lovit: Another quote you’ve often said, which you attribute to your father, is, “Good policy makes good politics,” you know, basically that politicians should enact good policies. And that will have positive effects. And then, people will be happier. And then, they’ll be more likely to get reelected.

You know, you, earlier, mentioned the case of the immigration bill, which—whether or not you think it’s good policy, that was a policy that was attempting to address an issue that many Americans are concerned about.

It was a proposal that was in the center, a compromise between the two parties and would have had real effects on the situation at the border. But then, that didn’t happen. So if that was good policy, that’s not how Congress people seem to see that. They chose not to—

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, one party—one person really. It was Donald Trump who told the Republicans, I don’t want this. Don’t do this because it’s—we can use it for the campaign. It’s one of those red-meat issues. It’s like climate change. It’s like abortion.

You raise that issue, and everybody digs in immediately. And the tragedy is that we keep letting it happen. I mean, the American people, after that—the bill went down, they weren’t outraged. And they should have been—not whether they agreed with the bill wholeheartedly or not.

But the fact that it was a political decision that stopped a policy position from being adopted should outrage people. It really should. And I’ve talked to people who said, “Well, it wasn’t very good. It had this problem or that problem.”

I say, look, you’re never going to please everybody. That’s impossible. It’s impossible at any level of government. It’s impossible in our lives. Our families don’t always agree on everything. I don’t always agree with myself initially.

But it’s one of those things that you have to say, what you do in public office is you try to do the best you can, the greatest good for the greatest number of people understanding that there are always going to be people who are not going to be happy. And in some cases, it may be people who would be adversely affected.

And your responsibility is to do whatever you can for those people to minimize any disruption that’s negative in their lives. But you still have to stick with what you know to be because you’ve consulted experts. Or you know in your heart—whatever.

You honestly believe it does the most good for the greatest number. And that’s where your focus has to be. And it has to be put aside—okay. This issue is going to be one we can really run on because it’s such a scary issue.

We can scare people with this immigration issue that all immigrants are rapists and murderers and gang drug runners. That’s a great issue for us. Well, yeah, it is. But it’s wrong because that’s not true. And it scares people. And it’s—people are being hurt.

Along the border, people are being hurt. In the countries, people are being hurt. We’ve got to get over that kind of thing. We’ve got to start solving the problems and dealing with them. And the American people don’t have faith in Congress.

I mean, that’s, again, another way this whole thing started is because, for—at least the Trump phenomena, what Trump was able to capture was the dissatisfaction of the majority of Americans with Congress, that Congress was not doing its job. They weren’t solving their problems. And they wanted their problems solved.

And that’s why he said, “I’m going to come in and blow up the system. I’m going to make it work. I’m going to throw everybody out.” And that sounded great. That was nirvana. That was what—exactly what they thought had to happen in order for the system to function. Just rip it all up, and start all over again because it hadn’t been solving their problems.

And so it comes back to Congress, which goes back to how the people were elected and what their base was and how extreme and just—been building on itself for quite a while.

Alex Lovit: You spent the first half of your career in politics, as we’ve discussed. And since leaving the Bush administration in 2003, you spent the second half of your career, more than two decades now, advocating for political reform.

And we’ve talked about some of the aspects of how you see the problems in the system. How would you describe what’s going wrong in American politics right now?

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, it’s a combination of things. It’s because we haven’t been teaching civics in schools for a long time. Most people can’t name the three branches of government. They have no understanding of how our government works and the responsibilities of the three branches.

That’s why they don’t worry when Donald Trump says he wants to take over an expand the powers of the presidency. The Republicans were all against that when you had Bill Clinton in office. You had Obama in office. And they were, my gawd, he’s trying to take over too much power in the presidency. Now, it’s just fine.

So that’s a problem, that people don’t really understand and that the power of money in politics has become so extraordinary. The amount that it takes, as you mentioned before—running for your office, you spend a huge amount of time raising money.

I was very lucky in my campaigns because, in New Jersey, they have—we have matching funds for the gubernatorial. And I had, early on before I ran for anything, thought, well, I don’t want that to happen because I don’t want my taxpayer money going to somebody I don’t like.

But on the other hand, what it does is it limits how much money you can raise and how much money you spend. It keeps it within some form of boundary. I mean, yes, you can get dark money nowadays. But it still puts somewhat of a lid on it.

And that’s only to the public good to start to reduce that. And then, it gets back to the parties digging in so heavy [things]—so wind up the way they want it with their districts and their states. And there are just a few states—as they say, for this election, it comes down to what? Five states? That’s all anybody’s going to care about?

You’re going to see JD Vance go from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Wisconsin and back again. And it’s going to be hitting those states. And someone else will take care of Arizona. There are not that many that matter, which is wrong as well because they’re so locked in, so partisan. And that’s where we’ve gone off the rails.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking there about a number of factors that are causing political dysfunction there so one of them being the strength of the party system and the way that really only a few districts are competitive in a presidential election. Only a few states are competitive—

Christine Todd Whitman: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit:—lack of civic education, concern about the amount of money in politics. Can you help our listeners understand what’s the policy cost for that? Like why does this matter if I’m an average American citizen? How does political dysfunction affect me?

Christine Todd Whitman: It means you’re not getting the kind of governance that you deserve. When you see one-party rule, be it Republican or Democrat, it’s not healthy. I mean, as governor, I had Republican House and Senate. And I would have much preferred to have had one of those two houses in the hands of the other party.

In fact, for some of the most controversial things I did, I did it with the Democrats. It’s just not healthy. You look across the country where you have one-party governance. And things aren’t the way people would want them to be in the cities, in the states where you have that. It’s not a healthy place.

It doesn’t give you the kind of options on solutions to problems because there will only be one way of looking at it through that party’s prism, not through the lens of what’s good for everybody. But what’s going to really help my base? Because that’s what you care about because that’s what keeps you in office.

And so it’s just not where we should be as a nation. And again, as—you know, I keep hearkening back. But our forefathers, our founders were pretty prescient. I don’t know how they thought of everything that they did and anticipated all that they did.

hey couldn’t anticipate everything. But they sure did a darn good job. And this was an area about which they had great concern from the get-go.

Alex Lovit: Well, let’s talk about some of the organizations and efforts you’re involved in to try to fix this problem. So one of those is the Forward Party where you serve as a co-chair. And if I understand it correctly, the Forward Party is an attempt to build a viable third party in the U.S., so candidates are focused on a commitment to democratic principles rather than to a particular set of policy agenda.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: So explain the Forward Party—

Christine Todd Whitman: Sure.

Alex Lovit:—and how it’s a solution to this problem.

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, at the national level, the Forward Party doesn’t have the traditional platform that people expect. It doesn’t tell the candidates you have to be pro-choice or anti-choice or pro-guns or anti-guns.

What it says is you agree to a set of principles which are pretty darn basic: respect for the rule of law; uphold the Constitution; keep civility and political discourse; adhere to the highest principles of personal conduct; look for ways to ensure that there’s a safe space to discuss the controversial issues; create that space; and work to ensure that everyone who is legally eligible to vote can vote; look for ways to improve the system.

We give them ideas such as ranked-choice voting or fusion voting [under that] or redistricting or going after money at the state level. It’s pretty hard to do at the federal level. But you can start to work on getting money [out of] politics at the state and local level.

And then, they have to sign that pledge. We vet them very carefully. The states vet them very carefully. We go back through their record to make sure, when they say they’re going to uphold those standards, that they’ve shown that they’ve done that in the past.

And then, it’s up to them to decide what’s the most important issue in my state. What do my constituents want? What do I believe in? We have, for instance, a Democratic senator in Philadelphia whose constituents and he believed in charter schools. But the Democratic party there don’t want to hear about it.

He’s a state senator. He said, “Okay. I am now a Forward Democrat.” Where we’re not on the ballot in a state, we will link with and we will support Republicans, Democrats, independents if they will sign the pledge.

And he just said, “I am a Forward Democrat,” which basically said to the Democrats, I’m going to caucus with you because I’m still a Democrat. But if it’s an issue of importance to my constituents in which I believe, then I am going to be out. I’m going to do what I think is right for my constituents.

And the difference is we have their back now where, before, if someone tried to act independently like that, there was nobody there to support them. There was no structure there to support them. We’re providing a structure. And we’ll get them volunteers. We’ll help with raising money.

We’ll provide that backbone for them. But they have that freedom. That’s—two candidates—Republicans—these were up in Connecticut—said, when they first affiliated with Forward—and we’re on the ballot there—they said they felt sort of untethered because they didn’t have a party saying here are the—what we believe in. This is it.

And then, they said, no, this is exactly what we wanted, why we’ve run for office, so we can do what we think is right for our constituents and then do the kinds of things in which we believe.

So that’s—we’re providing the public with an opportunity to vote for candidates who will represent them and not a political party. We’re on the ballot in six states now. But we have candidates across the country that we’re supporting.

Alex Lovit: So as you’re saying, this is a relatively new effort, you know, on the ballot in six states—

Christine Todd Whitman: Yeah.

Alex Lovit:—and counting, I believe.

Christine Todd Whitman: It’s been about a year that we’ve really been on the ground doing it. And we’re focusing on state and local. We’re not playing in the presidential except to the extent that there tends to be a reverse-coattails effect that, if someone doesn’t want to vote, for instance, in this election because they don’t like their choices at the top but they see a local councilman or school board member or gubernatorial candidate whom they like, a Forward candidate, they’ll come and vote for them.

And then, they tend to stay on the ballot looking for similar candidates up and down. And that can only be healthy for our democracy to have more people out voting and voting for more offices.

Alex Lovit: So if you were to look out five, 10, 20 years, what would be your hope for the role that the Forward Party would play? How might it evolve over time?

Christine Todd Whitman: That it would be a national organization on the ballot in every state and that we continue to function the way its functioning, which is that the states are really the ones in control, that they’re the ones who are going, we will provide some background for them.

We will help them with the ensuring and vetting the candidates, as it were, to ensure that they really are who they say they are and what they want to do. But it’s going to be an organization of party in the non-traditional sense that will really continue to represent their constituents.

And they’re going to be different. In every state, they’ll be different, what they issues are and where they are on the issues. That’s healthy—as I said before, as we’ve all said, you know, nobody—you can’t make everybody happy. That’s impossible.

So you can do it. But you can do a much better job if you’re doing it at the state and local level because those are the places where the decisions that most immediately impact you are made. Those decisions are made at that state level or at that local community level that you feel immediately.

And then, also, the good news is that you don’t have to have 100 percent. I mean, if you think about Joe Manchin’s influence in the last Congress, in the last Senate, he was one man. And he made a huge impact on a number of issues.

So if you get that pivotal nucleus, if you can get four or six people in a state senate, let’s say, or in the U.S. Senate, you can have a huge influence. They can have a huge influence on how issues are discussed and what’s brought up.

Nowadays, if you’re persona non grata with the party bosses in Washington, you can’t even get an issue heard in committee or subcommittee. That’s how strong their power is even if you have a majority of members who want to have it heard.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask you about another organization that you’re involved in, in fact which you cofounded and serve as co-chair, the States United Democracy Center. So first of all, what is States United? What is it trying to accomplish?

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, it’s a non-partisan, non-political organization. It is primarily lawyers, of which I am not. What we’re doing is working with states’ attorneys general, secretaries of state, governors on what to expect in the elections, the legislation that we see popping up around the country, what they can do to address that if it’s contrary to democratic principles.

We’re about upholding democracy. We’re about strengthening democracy, upholding democracy. We also believe in holding people accountable for their actions. John Eastman—we were very early on appealing to the California bar to take action against John Eastman for the illegal advice that he gave President Trump.

We’ve worked with police organizations as to what to expect on election day, what is appropriate, what their responsibilities are and what their powers are. But it’s all about protecting our democracy and keeping it functioning and safe.

Alex Lovit: So among the things that States United does is a lot of research about the nuts and bolts of administering elections. You know, of course, free and fair elections are a baseline requirement for democracy.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: But this has become a partisan issue with Donald Trump and others casting doubts on the 2020 election. First of all, how do elections work in this country, in brief? And why should citizens have trust in that system?

Christine Todd Whitman: That’s one of the things that we do [deal with] and we have done before elections is actually put out information on who is responsible in the process. And it does differ slightly from state to state. But in general, you’ve got: the secretary of state, who will oversee most elections; the legislature that can make laws around it.

But as elections are being administered, as they happen, it’s generally the secretaries of state who have oversight. And leading up to that day, you have people who are very well trained as to what to expect, how to handle the ballots, where there are electronic ballots.

I mean, I see that Trump has called for all paper ballots and only count ballots on election day that people physically bring to election day. That would eliminate an enormous number of people. That would send us backward in this democracy. It would make it very hard. It would slow down the process.

The thing that people should understand is there’s very little corruption on election day and in the electoral process. It’s not true that you’ve had thousands—hundreds of thousands of fake ballots put across the country, that you have massive illegal immigrants voting—just not true.

After the 2020 election, there were, what, 61, 62 cases heard by judges, Republican and Democrat, some appointed by Trump even who said there’s no there there. Are there mistakes made? And are there some places where you have problems? Yes.

But nothing’s been seen that would overturn the outcome of an election—presidential election. And you should feel confident in going into your polling place that you have trained officials there. There’s a process in place for securing those ballot boxes and ensuring that they go to a safe place to be counted and that that process is overseen—the parties each—and again, it can vary in states.

But in general, the parties have their people who are poll watchers who will watch to ensure that they think things are going well as well as poll watchers appointed by local electoral officials. So it’s a very safe process.

The machines have always worked pretty well. I mean, have there been messes, you know, screw-ups, yes. But they get corrected pretty quickly. But we haven’t seen anything that—in the history, I can’t even—I’m trying to think of exceptions—where there was enough fraud going on to overturn the outcome, to change the outcome of an election.

It just hasn’t happened. And we need to feel confident about that. So that is one of the things that we do at States United, which is educate people as to what to expect, what they should have to have with them when they go—you know, again, varies by state what you have to have with you when you go to the ballot box as far as identification goes.

And they need to know that. They need to know where their polling places are. But there are—just an example of a case where a person—where the barriers and the guardrails worked in Texas. There was a woman who had been in prison, incarcerated. She was released. She’d served her term.

She went to vote. She said, “I don’t know whether I’m okay.” She didn’t know. They let her vote. But they put her vote aside. And it was never counted because they checked. And as a convicted felon, she was not allowed to vote.

Unfortunately, the state electoral officials—they put her in jail. They arrested her for trying to vote illegally. She didn’t try to vote illegally. She just didn’t know. And her vote was never counted. It was put aside because of her record.

But that’s the—when people get scared that, boy, there are all these people coming out trying to vote illegally, they do things like that. And that hurt her reputation. It set her back in her recovery from whatever it was she had done.

I mean, it’s just—that’s the kind of stuff we have to watch out for, the overreaction to this message that’s being drummed out there that somehow there are all these ways to infiltrate the process and turn it upside down. And that’s just not true.

Alex Lovit: Well, let me ask you a few questions about the EPA. So you served as the head administrator of the EPA. And you know, the EPA has often been at the center of disputes over the role of the administrative agencies in American government.

Christine Todd Whitman: [Fair enough].

Alex Lovit: And there’s a lot of questions about that right now with Chevron, with Project 2025. So first of all, let’s just talk about what the EPA does. EPA currently employs about 17,000 people. That’s a pretty large workforce.

Christine Todd Whitman: Small for federal government but—

Alex Lovit: Well, it sounds like a lot of people to me. You know, so those are all getting paid with taxpayer dollars, you know.

Christine Todd Whitman: Yeah.

Alex Lovit: What do all those people do? What are those 17,000 people doing?

Christine Todd Whitman: Protecting human health and the environment. That’s what their job is. That’s what they’re committed to. I was told before I went in, watch out. They’re all Democrats. And they hate Republicans. And they’re all tree huggers. And they’re not going to work with you. And there are all sorts of things they can do to disrupt.

And what I found was a workforce that really believed in their mission of protecting human health and the environment. Were there a few outliers who just were never going to work with me? Yeah. There were. That would be true in any organization.

But in general, if they believed what I was doing, what the administration was doing really was to protect human health and the environment. Even though they might have wanted a different way to do it, they’d still work with you.

I didn’t have a problem with that. They really are dedicated primarily scientists—[a number of] scientists. There-there are a lot of people out in the field who were going constantly to checking water, checking air, trying to keep our country safe and healthy.

And they are truly committed. It is a regulatory agency because, guess what, mother nature could care less about geopolitical boundaries. They don’t care. If I have closed down every industry in New Jersey, I still would have had trouble with clean air standards because of air transport from the coal-mining states of West Virginia and Kentucky.

Wind blows that way. It blows west to east. We’ve seen that when you’ve had major fires in Canada last year. New York—you couldn’t see across the street because of the smoke. It should resonate to people. Water—it flows down. And what’s happening upstream can affect you downstream.

It’s one of those things where it makes no sense to say to a state, “Well, you can have your set of air standards, and we’ll have ours.” EPA’s job is to set the floor as to what science tells them is safe for human health consumption and safe for the environment.

And then, if a state wants to go beyond that and be more restrictive, okay, that’s fine. That’s up to them and their constituents. But bottom line, that’s EPA’s job. Do they get it right all the time? No.

And that’s one of the things that I think should be automatic in any agency that’s a regulatory agency but particularly EPA is to go back—be required to go back every five, maybe 10 years to reassess. Has this problem been taken care of?

Have we learned something new about where the standards should be? Do we understand more now than we did before? And should we be regulating something that we didn’t see? And should we deregulate something that we thought was bad?

That should always happen because those things do change. But in general, it’s an agency that really is committed to protecting the public.

Alex Lovit: So some of what you’re talking about there in the fact that air and water don’t respect our arbitrary state boundaries is relevant to a Supreme Court case that was just recently decided where my state, Ohio, sued your former agency, the EPA, and successfully blocked a rule that would have—

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit:—put some limits on emissions for cross-state purposes. Do you have any comments on that case?

Christine Todd Whitman: Yeah. I think they made the wrong decision. They have put people’s health in danger, quite frankly. And the idea that a judge would know more than a scientist about what’s safe for humans is outside of my ability to accept. Let me put it that way.

It made no sense. Could you say the agency went too far in it? Maybe in that Chevron decision. But it would have been more to refine it than to do what they did, which was basically throw it out and make it almost impossible for the agency to regulate air standards.

And particularly in poor communities that didn’t have the political clout, those are where a lot of these factories and things are located. The people who are being most affected are the people who can least afford to be affected, that don’t have access to the kind of healthcare that others have.

We see children in minority communities often particularly with higher incidents of asthma and other issues, heart problems for the elderly, that come from poor air quality. I just thought it was a really bad decision, I guess, is the best way to put it.

Alex Lovit: Well, so let’s back up for a minute and kind of give a civics textbook of how the government is supposed to work. So if I have this right—so correct me here—the legislature is supposed to pass the laws.

Christine Todd Whitman: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: The executive branch is supposed to enforce the laws. And in this case, the legislature creates an agency like the EPA. Congress says we can’t figure out every particularity of how to apply this regulation.

So we’re going to create an agency. We’re going to staff it with experts. And then, those folks are going to help apply the law to the specific scenarios across the country. And then, the judiciary—you know, their job is to try to understand [laughs] where to draw that line.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: This idea of administrative independence—so having experts—nonpolitical staff at agencies like the EPA has come under attack recently from a couple different directions. One of those directions has been from the Supreme Court.

So we previously mentioned the Ohio versus EPA decision that just came out. But the bigger decision this term was Loper Bright versus Raimondo overturning Chevron doctrine.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: That’s a lot of jargon for people that aren’t following very closely.

Christine Todd Whitman: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: But basically, what that does is take away some power for interpretation of Congress’s laws from the administrative agencies and, instead, put that power in the hands of the courts to determine how to make those interpretations. How do you think the end of Chevron will affect the EPA?

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, I think it’s gone a long way to eviscerating their ability to protect Americans, to be able to regulate and ensure that the public is being appropriately protected from air-quality issues because it has put it in the hands of the judiciary to make that final decision because people are always going to appeal.

The companies that are making money out of more pollution because they’re increasing their output say of energy—they’re not going to like to have themselves constrained at all irrespective of the harm it does to their communities where their workers live.

We’ve seen that happen with DuPont and other famous cases where people were being poisoned, and they knew it. But now, it’s going to go to the judiciary. And the judiciary—they don’t have experts like that.

Their ability to interpret that is going to be very limited plus the fact that it’s going to add time to the implementation of regulations like that should they be determined to be appropriate and important. And it’s going to cost a lot of money because you’re going to spend a lot of time in court.

So a lot of the work the agency is going to do is going to be with their legal department because you have a whole host of lawyers at the agency because you are always being sued. But they’re going to be spending a lot of time in court. So good news for lawyers at the EPA, maybe bad news for—

Christine Todd Whitman: Yes.

Alex Lovit:—scientists at the EPA.

Christine Todd Whitman: And good news for lawyers everywhere. I found that they tend to win out no matter what the situation is.

Alex Lovit: And then, the second way that administrative-agency independence is under attack recently is this idea that the deep state, that unelected bureaucrats are making decisions affecting policy in ways that really aren’t appropriate, that really these decisions should be made by elected officials.

And there is this plan, Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, which is a vision of what a Trump presidency might look like or any conservative president. But Trump is the nominee.

Christine Todd Whitman: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit: You know, so a lot of that is based on this idea of firing large numbers of these non-political civil-service workers and replacing them with political loyalists. What do you think the impact of that might be?

Christine Todd Whitman: Bad, [laughter] in a word. Bad. Have some of the agencies grown too big? Yes. I mean, it’s true that, at any level of government, once you have—you set up something, territory comes into it. And nobody wants to give up. And they just never seem to get smaller. They seem to get bigger.

I mean, I cut—I did across-the-board cuts here in New Jersey when I first took office. And the howling was amazing, lots of demonstrations. People were furious at me. But it was done because we’d gotten too big in some areas. There’s no question about it.

We had to cut back. And at the same time, you have to cut spending. Because I was cutting taxes, you have to cut spending. And that’s the way it works. It doesn’t work otherwise. So the problem is that elected officials—they have to depend on staff.

They don’t know everything. They can’t be an expert in every field. And yet, you’re asked to legislate all kinds of issues. I mean, you think a rancher who’s serving in Congress knows a whole lot about underground tunnels going into New York? It doesn’t make any sense. You have to have a staff.

If you just have political staff, then every time you have a change in election, we’re going to be whipsawed back and forth between what the parties want to do. It’s going to make no sense. There’s going to be no consistency in the legislative experience.

There’s going to be no consistency in our approach to some of the major issues which transcend politics like climate change. That’s an issue that—it’s not political. It’s really not. It’s about people’s health. We’re seeing it in these major storms we’re getting and this heatwave that we’ve been living through. And that’s been throughout the country.

We’ve seen it—this has been the 11th year in a row we’ve seen increasing temperatures. It’s real. It’s happening. It’s an existential threat to the United States as well because of particularly impacting Third World countries where you have not terribly stable governments to begin with.

And when you displace people because they can no longer feed themselves the way they did because of droughts and things and they move into cities where there are no jobs for them, there’s no housing for them—and that’s where ISIS and other terrorist organizations go to recruit.

It becomes a real issue for us here in the United States. And so it’s—to say you want all political partisan people staffing agencies in government makes no sense. It makes no sense. You have some. You don’t have a lot. There are political appointees in every department and agency.

You have a certain number you can put in. But you don’t want the whole department to be nothing but political people. That’s when you get into, well, you know, my cousin was really helpful in the campaign. And his son or daughter, her son or daughter wants a job. I’ll give it to them whether they’re qualified or not. Do you want those kind of people in there trying to make these kinds of decisions and implementing them? I don’t think so.

Alex Lovit: How much of the problem here is just political dysfunction, Congressional dysfunction that we were talking about earlier?

Christine Todd Whitman: A lot of it comes back to that, people frustrated that they didn’t see Congress moving anything forward that was really impacting their daily lives. That’s the issue to which Trump appealed, and it’s worked.

Alex Lovit: We were just talking about climate change. And obviously, as you said, you see that as an existential threat to the United States and to things larger than the United States, in fact. It’s a global problem. You’ve always argued that economic growth and environmental protection don’t need to be opposed to one another.

Christine Todd Whitman: Right.

Alex Lovit: How do you see the positive path forward for humanity to effectively reduce emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change? What’s the U.S.’s responsibility?

Christine Todd Whitman: Well, for instance, I’m a big believer in nuclear power. And there are new technologies, small modular reactions particularly. The rest of the world is looking at these things. We ought to be looking at these things.

We can create jobs around them. That’s an exciting new technology. We’re one of the best in the world on coming up with new technologies and in manufacturing. That’s where we ought to be looking. We ought to be looking at what we can do that is going to build our economy.

Farming—changing our farming practices in ways that encourage a natural regeneration of the earth and the ability of mother nature to take care of some of these issues and doing it in ways that help farmers and become more profitable—there are a lot of things that we can do, manufacturing new engines, this idea—I mean, I worry because everybody says you’ve got to—if we have all electric cars, we’ll solve the problem.

No. We won’t because the cars are only as clean as the energy used to produce their electricity. And our infrastructure is not prepared to handle a whole influx of new power. We have to deal with that one first which is not a sexy issue, not something people want to talk about. But it means construction and jobs.

And those are the kinds of things we ought to be looking at. What can we do that will help us in the long term and will ensure that we continue to grow? And we’re entrepreneurial. We’re a wonderfully entrepreneurial country. And we’ve seen these startups that come from nowhere and create hundreds of jobs.

And we shouldn’t be afraid of that. We’ve been through this. I mean, we were—agricultural society. We became an industrial society. Then, we became manufacturing. And then, we became IT. And every time you have those transitions, people get displaced. There’s no question about it.

But there are things you can do for those people to help them. I mean, for instance, you’re not going to take a 45-year-old coal miner whose life has been that way and their family tradition and turn them into a high-tech person. But they can be someone who is in construction. They can be someone who’s in manufacturing. They can do those jobs enormously well.

It’s up to the government to attract the relevant businesses to those areas that are where people are being displaced from their normal jobs, giving the kind of tax breaks that will help bring the companies in and then letting go, training these people and not to see it as always a zero-sum game because it’s just not.

And by the way, we can’t continue to thrive as a country if we don’t have clean air and clean water and not just clean water but just water in general which is becoming a real issue particularly in the Southwest where people are being daily effected by water or the lack thereof.

So we have to start taking some action because that’s going to be a negative on our economic growth. And we should be looking for those positives as well.

Alex Lovit: Well, I appreciate that pragmatic attitude of here we have the—you know, in some ways, the largest problem humanity has ever faced. And let’s figure out how to fix it. And I think a lot of this conversation and a lot of conversations about politics recently can tend to be a bit gloomy.

You know, we’re talking about major problems—not only climate change but major problems in the American political system right now. And I take some inspiration from you that you’ve always been an advocate for, if you see a problem, figure out how to fix it.

You’ve been very active throughout your career in trying to make plans and make institutions and figure out how to solve the problems. So as a final question, where do you draw that hope? Why do you believe that we can fix the problems in our system and build a democracy that works for all Americans?

Christine Todd Whitman: I’ve seen it happen before. I mean, we are a very resilient country. We think these are bad times. Let’s think about the Civil War. I don’t want us to slip into that because there are those who are advocating for it. That’s why we’ve got to be very careful and very vigilant now.

But I don’t see it happening. I see too many good people who want to solve problems. I may not agree with them all on the issues that they think are the most important or how they want to go at them. But that doesn’t matter. They want to go at problem solving.

And I have found that, whenever you put people in a room together, people with different ideas and different places on the various issues and, first of all, say, “Do you think this is a problem? Is this an issue that needs addressing?” and, if they agree to that, then you say, “Okay. Let’s talk about solving it.”

And it’s amazing what gets done. We did that with regulations. One regulation where I was told on the Hill that, if I went ahead with it, we were going to destroy every engine manufacturer in this congressman’s district, and the world would come to an end.

And I put the EPA, I put one of the environmental groups, I put the Office of Management and Budget and I put an engine manufacturer together in a room. And I said, “Figure this one out because it’s an issue.”

And they did. And everybody was happy, even the environmentalists initially until one environmental group said it was the greatest thing done since taking lead out of gasoline. And they got a whole bunch of grief from the other environmental groups.

So they said I shouldn’t say that anymore. So, of course, I did everywhere to use an example how both sides—no side is innocent in this idea of playing politics with issues, with controversial issues. But we did solve the problem.

And it was emissions from diesel engines [of non-road] diesel engines, which are the backhoes and all the construction equipment you have in cities and stuff which was a bigger impact on human health and even from the cars.

So I was told I couldn’t get it done. It was going to ruin all these manufacturers. It was going after the Bush base, farmers and all. And guess what? We got it done. And it’s 95—97 percent lower emissions. And people were happy.

Alex Lovit: Well, I hope we can find similar ways to solve all of the other problems that are in front of us right now.

Christine Todd Whitman: You and me both.

Alex Lovit: Christine Todd Whitman, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Christine Todd Whitman: My pleasure, Alex. Thank you for having me. [music plays]

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a senior program officer and historian with the foundation. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. George Drake, Jr. is the episode producer for this show. And Isabel Pergande is our research assistant.

This is Isabel’s last episode on staff here at the foundation, as she’s headed off to graduate school next month. So I just wanted to say a word of thanks here. Isabel has been a huge part of getting this show launched, helping us keep an organized production schedule and helping me dig into varying topics from one episode to the next.

She’s done everything from developing interview questions to creating clips for social media. She’s smart and hard-working. And I’m enough of a believer in the justice of the universe to think that she’ll find success and recognition throughout her education and her career. But I’m going to miss her. Thanks, Isabel.

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