In 1976, he was appointed manager of Lehigh University's research program development, serving in this capacity and as an engineering consultant to private industry until 1979.

Ritter represented the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania, which includes the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, and has hybrid economy of both heavy manufacturing companies and employees and a substantial university and college constituency.

On both committees and in his legislative initiatives and voting record, Ritter led an effort to bring a greater scientific approach to the politicized debate over environmental and energy regulation.

Ritter supported free markets and small government policies, though he also cast several trade votes in favor of his district's steel and apparel industries, both of which were then beginning to lose global market share to mostly Asia-based foreign competitors who were benefiting from government subsidies, limited regulatory constraints, low wages, and other practices.

As part of this effort, he made progress in building bridges between the U.S. Congress and some of the world's leading global total quality management thought leaders, including W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, Armand V. Feigenbaum, and others.

Ritter was a champion of human rights and opposed what he saw as the Soviet Union's expansionist activity in Afghanistan, Cuba, Central America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

In addition to his service on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Ritter was the founding chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Baltic States and Ukraine whose co-chairmen were Dennis Hertel (D-MI) and U.S.

At the Washington Monument in 1983, Ritter addressed a memorial rally in support of millions of Ukrainians who were killed in the forced starvation employed by Josef Stalin in the man-made famine of the Holodomor in the early 1930s.

While his eastern Pennsylvania district was ancestrally Democratic, it also had a considerable tinge of social conservatism and a significant number of Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian Americans who supported Ritter's strong anti-communism.

Ritter developed and engaged grassroots involvement in support of moving some environmental policies in a more fact and science-based direction, as opposed to a Washington, D.C.–based politicized one.

NEPI's initiatives sought expanded involvement of the scientific community and bipartisan representation from states and localities, which had traditionally been excluded from the development of federal environmental policies.

The organization's working groups and annual conferences, held in Washington, D.C., drew some 250-300 participants, including governors, mayors, state legislators, chairpersons of various Congressional Committees, Cabinet members, EPA administrators, White House officials, environmental advocacy group leaders, and leading legal and scientific figures.