Word: gorsuch
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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...
...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...