Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...colliding efforts to investigate the mess at EPA produced an elephants' ballet. The confusion hit a pinnacle at midweek, when President Reagan spoke so nebulously at his press conference that the New York Times and other news organizations prematurely reported that he had decided to give Congress the disputed documents. They culled that impression from the President's statement that he would "never invoke Executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing." White House Spokesman Larry Speakes spent most of Thursday explaining that the President had really meant to reassert his claim of Executive privilege. Indeed, at the White House...
...Capitol Hill, members of the House Public Works Committee listened incredulously as a parade of EPA employees tried to explain why two paper shredders had suddenly turned up in the agency's hazardous-waste section just a few weeks after Gorsuch was held in contempt for refusing to yield documents from that office. Offering testimony studded with contradictions, they displayed EPA press releases titled "Second Shredder Response" and "Shredder Update." Gene Lucero, an assistant to Rita Lavelle when she ran the section, said that the agency had mistakenly ordered two extra shredders and a "helpful clerk" offered them...
Lavelle, whose Feb. 7 firing set off the EPA crisis, provided another erratic sub plot. After pledging to cooperate with congressional investigators, she holed up in her apartment and refused to honor subpoenas from two House subcommittees looking into her management of the agency's hazardous-waste program. In another bizarre twist, she sent her appointment calendars, which she had resisted giving to the House subcommittees that had subpoenaed them, to a Senate committee that had never requested them. The calendars, listing numerous luncheon and dinner dates with representatives of chemical companies she regulated but very few with environmental...
...center of the congressional investigations is the $1.6 billion Superfund program, created by Congress three years ago to clean up the nation's most dangerous toxic-waste dumps. On Friday, House leaders were given a new EPA audit showing that the agency cannot account for $53.6 million, almost one-third of the 1982 appropriation for the Superfund. "At best, EPA officials have been sloppy and incompetent," said Democratic Representative James Scheuer...
Congress continued to widen its investigation to cover all of the EPA's enforcement efforts. Called before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Gorsuch was accused of trying to cripple the agency through budget reductions. As the "Ice Queen" defended her stormy tenure, her eyes misted with a few rare tears. "Nobody can be wrong all that much of the time," she said. "I have to judge that a great deal of it is political harassment...