Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan's proposed budget would slash EPA funding in half, and in his testimony Duehay explained that state and local governments could not assume financial responsibility for the eliminated programs...
...argument is the Clean Air Act, one of the more successful and popular pieces of environmental legislation to emerge from Congress. Passed in 1970 at a time of heightened concern about pollution, the law empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to begin a much needed atmospheric cleanup. It required the EPA to set strict limits on seven major pollutants, including toxic agents such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and lead. It mandated steady reductions in emissions from automotive tail pipes and factory smokestacks. It also gave the EPA power to force the states, some of whom showed little or no interest...
Despite protests and omissions, the Administration insists that the new bill will continue the cleanup of the nation's air, but at what EPA Chief Anne Gorsuch calls "a more reasoned pace." Some House Democrats from industrial states, notably Michigan's John Dingell, head of the Energy and Commerce Committee, have given it strong support. But, as in 1981, there is no shortage of opponents. In the Republican-controlled Senate, Vermont's Robert Stafford, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has pledged to keep the 1970 Clean Air Act as is, except for minor revisions...
Gorsuch has also attempted to belittle the results of EPA'S enforcement efforts, but the evidence sharply contradicts her. Among hundreds of examples of EPA's impact: particulates of soot and dust emitted into the air were reduced from 29,000 tons in 1972 to just 790 tons by 1979 in Massachusetts, from 41,000 to 3,500 in Maine and New Hampshire, and from 139,000 to 82,000 in previously hazy Detroit. In one of the many rivers cleaned up under EPA rules, the Penobscot in Maine, one salmon was caught...
...reason for Gorsuch's unpopularity within EPA and also on Capitol Hill is her brusque, no-nonsense manner. She keeps a strict time limit on all appointments. When asked an inconvenient question, she is apt to retort that any answer would be "the rankest kind of speculation." Yet, in a prideful display of prodigious homework, she lectures listeners in mind-numbing detail on EPA programs about which she knew almost nothing until her appointment. Though she has been in the midst of a divorce since before she went to Washington and serves as a devoted single parent to Sons...