Peter H Kostmayer was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the fall of 1976, shortly after his 30th birthday. Winning by 1,312 votes, Kostmayer became the first Democrat to represent Bucks County Pennsylvania since 1932.
He was
defeated by about a thousand votes in the Reagan landslide of 1980, but was re-elected in 1982 by a similar margin.
Elected by his colleagues as a regional and then a deputy whip, Kostmayer served on the committees on the Interior, Energy and
Commerce and Foreign Affairs.
From 1982 through 1992, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, Kostmayer was a leading opponent of both administrations’ environmental and foreign policies.
Kostmayer earned among the highest
scores in Congress from environmental groups and authored legislation adding to the nation’s wild and scenic rivers, wilderness areas and its national parks. He was the leading proponent of international family planning in Congress, leading efforts
to expand voluntary family planning at home and abroad and opposing efforts to limit a woman’s right to choose.
In 1992, after 14 years in Congress, Kostmayer was defeated by a Republican and joined the Clinton administration as the regional
EPA administrator in the mid-Atlantic states, where he led fights against the Walt Disney Company’s efforts to build a theme park adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield in Maryland and against efforts to weaken clean air and water standards
in his home state of Pennsylvania.
After leaving the administration, Kostmayer headed Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection) in Washington, D.C., a national nonprofit focused on universal access to family planning for poor women
and the environmental issues related to world population growth.
In 2005, Kostmayer moved to New York, becoming CEO of Citizens Committee for New York City, which provides micro-grants to community- and neighborhood-based organizations in the
poorest neighborhoods that engage residents to plan and implement neighborhood improvement projects. He retired in 2020.
Kostmayer is a graduate of Columbia University and lives in New York City with his husband Doug Hirn, an attorney at Debevoise
& Plimpton.