Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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UNDER the mismanagement of Reagan-appointed administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suffered its worst year ever. Charged by environmentalist critics with moving slowly in toxic-waste cleanup efforts, the Agency is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and a half-dozen congressional subcommittees seeking answers to allegations of mismanagement of the $1.6 billion Superfund and of the use of cleanup decisions for political leverage. Each day the list of charges grows longer, highlighting the agency's failure to meet its responsibilities, and raising serious questions about Burford's understanding of her job description...
...sources suggest that some of the papers may have been shredded and computer disks erased to keep them from Congress. Investigators also hope to learn why money from the Superfund, which was set up to clean up sites whose polluters cannot be identified, have only trickled out, though the EPA managed to lose $53.6 million through bookkeeping errors...
With toxic wastes posing health hazards to hundreds of thousands of Americans, the EPA has a task crucial to the nation. Just last week the Agency had to spend over $30 million to buy the entire town of Times Beach. Mo., to protect its 2500 former inhabitants from poisonous dioxin, a suspected carcinogen. With 14,000 dumps to monitor and clean up, the EPA has its work cut out for it. Yet Burford has been remarkably reluctant to begin the task in earnest...
...number of sources. She may have been thwarted by Superfund administrator Rita Lavelle, whom Burford recently fired for her connections with chemical-industry polluters. But many insiders see Lavelle as Burford's scapegoat. Burford herself may have business or personal links amounting to a conflict of interest: the EPA recently awarded a $7.7 million cleanup contract to a company accused of being a polluter in its own right--a company represented by Denver attorney James Sanderson. Sanderson, who is currently being investigated by the FBI, recently finished a 15-month stint as a part-time consultant to Burford...
...from lawmakers of either party. The Senators warned her that they plan to get to the bottom of charges of mismanagement and political favoritism that taint the Superfund program. Chided Democratic Senator Max Baucus: "I think there's a feeling in the committee, and the country, that the EPA no longer cares...