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...addition, Gorsuch has cut spending on every major EPA program, including the one that she says deserves top funding priority: the new $1.6 billion "superfund" to clean up abandoned toxic dump sites. She has also urged major retrenchments in the Clean Air Act; late last week she proposed a three-year delay and substantial weakening of impending carbon monoxide emission standards for heavy gasoline-fueled trucks. Mistrustful of the presumed environmentalist bias of career EPA employees, she has centralized control. Research scientists now cannot release findings until they have been approved as "appropriate" by four levels of the bureaucracy; public...
Enforcement procedures have been disrupted by similar roadblocks. The Washington enforcement staff was dispersed into four unconnected subdivisions. Field offices have been told to check with EPA headquarters before pursuing cases against alleged corporate violations of pollution laws. As a result, the number of violations referred for prosecution has dropped from 230 in 1980 to just 42 in nearly eight months since Gorsuch took office...
...upshot of all these changes, even Gorsuch admits, is dismal morale among a once elite corps of highly trained scientists and lawyers. Dissidents within the EPA leak virtually every budget draft and controversial memo to the press and to a growing number of Gorsuch's critics in Congress, including some Republicans. The leaks have made Gorsuch feel even more embattled. She has taken the offensive against the EPA's much praised first decade, claiming a tradition of "mismanagement and no management." Some points are valid. When she took office there was a backlog of more than...
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...