Word: gorsuch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Colorado legislator in the late '70s, Gorsuch, 39, led a successful battle to block her state's participation in the EPA's hazardous-wastes program. She also fought for less stringent auto emission standards in a Colorado clean-air law. Thus when President Reagan nominated her last February to be the nation's chief enforcer against pollution, environmentalists were appalled. They feared that she had been appointed less to run the agency than to dismantle it. As she completes the first year of her imperious reign-restive subordinates at EPA call her the "Ice Queen"-conservationists...
...Gorsuch insists that she believes in EPA's cleanup programs and its statutory pledge of independence from industry and special interests. But, she argues, "the agency's work can be done better and more efficiently without the same commitment of resources...
Critics claim that her real goal is to slash the agency's budget and staff so deeply that it cannot function. Gorsuch has volunteered reductions in EPA spending from $1.36 billion a year when she took office to less than $950 million by fiscal 1983. A ranking official of EPA last week disclosed that Gorsuch is readying dismissal notices for at least 750 of the agency's 4,200 Washington headquarters staff and probably for a commensurate percentage of the 5,800 field staff. Those cuts would come on top of the 1,000 jobs already eliminated...
...some critics' estimates, at the end of Gorsuch's first year in office, roughly 80% of agency employees will have quit or been laid off or demoted. To William Drayton, former EPA assistant administrator for planning and management under President Carter, the layoffs are deliberate destruction. He charges: "Knowing that the public will never stand for the repeal of these environmental laws, Reagan is gutting them through the personnel and budgetary back doors. With only the shattered shell of an EPA left, our environmental statutes will be largely meaningless...
...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...