"He was a shining star from the outset," said Connaughton. "He has done as we would have expected and hoped."

A misleading story line

In the beginning, expectations for Stephen Lee Johnson were high. Even a few environmentalists welcomed his appointment as EPA administrator in 2005.

Bush pitched Johnson as a technocrat, the first EPA scientist to rise to the top spot, a person who had dedicated his career to environmental protection - not a partisan politician. But the story line was misleading.

Johnson was not plucked from obscurity on merit alone. His transition from career bureaucrat to political appointee was set in motion by a Kentucky lobbyist, with a boost from then-senior White House aide Karl Rove.

And Johnson did not join EPA in the late 1970s for the primary reason hundreds of his left-leaning contemporaries did. He joined EPA, he said, because he wanted to learn more about government regulation, which he found onerous.

These touchstones - loyalty to the president and an antiregulatory bent - became themes of the Johnson era at EPA.

During his tenure, EPA funding fell dramatically, employee morale plummeted, and priorities changed.

Johnson's proposed 2009 budget was $7.1 billion - down from $8 billion in 2005, and 26 percent lower than in 2001. Among the biggest cuts: $500 million less for states to improve sewer systems.

The unions representing most of EPA's 17,200 employees protested not just the cuts, but heavy-handed efforts to censor science in ways that benefited business over the environment.

"It's sad to see," said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who resigned in 2003 as Bush's first EPA administrator after repeated clashes with the White House. "It's a good agency, and there's a lot of good people there who will help you as long as they think you want to move forward. But if they think you're not serious about protecting the environment, they'll turn on you."

Perhaps one of the best insights into Johnson's vision for EPA can be found in written testimony he submitted to a Senate committee this year. In the document, Johnson laid out his top 11 goals.

No. 1 was clean energy, particularly approving drilling for "thousands of new oil and gas wells" on tribal and federal lands. No. 2 was homeland security.

Environmental enforcement and sound science ranked ninth and 10th.

"If it wasn't so sad, it would be laughable," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the committee with EPA oversight.

Johnson, who often begins work before dawn, has faced an unusual number of important environmental decisions - on climate change, ozone, lead, perchlorate, mercury, sulfur dioxide, tailpipe emissions and wetlands.

"He's stepped into more hard decisions than any other administrator," said George Gray, who left a largely industry-funded research center at Harvard University to become EPA's senior science adviser. "It's been a very, very intense time."

Critics cite some of Johnson's lesser-known decisions as evidence that he tried to overhaul EPA to benefit business, not the environment. Johnson approved pesticide testing on human subjects, lowered the monetary value of a human life by $1 million, reduced air pollution reporting requirements for corporate farms, and altered a chemical risk-assessment program that has slowed analysis to a crawl.

"What strikes me is the totality of what's happened, just one thing after another," said Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "They didn't just change the rules. They tried to change the playing field."

Johnson has been hailed by environmentalists on some fronts. For example, he recently killed the Yazoo Pumps Projects, a major Mississippi Delta flood-control program that threatened to destroy 67,000 acres of wetlands. He also recently issued more stringent limits on lead, which were generally praised.