This Ice Queen Does Not Melt

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Is she controlling pollution or pulverizing the controller?

The walls of Anne Gorsuch's spartan Washington office are hung with tasteful, unobtrusive pictures of wildlife, as befits her role as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Her enemies, who are becoming legion, suggest that more suitable decoration would be stark photos of toxic waste dumps, polluted rivers and smog-choked cities.

As a 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' worst fears are being exceeded.

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 by attrition; the EPA resignation rate has boomed since Gorsuch took office.

Senior staffers held over from the Carter Administration are especially vulnerable. Many have learned they are in trouble through the newly cracked Crayola code: EPA superiors have been drawing up lists of executives with dots next to their names, red for acceptable performers, brown for those to be eased out.

By 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."

In 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 information programs, such as slide shows and computer software dealing with science issues, require seven levels of approval.

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.

The 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 1,000 modifications of various state plans to reduce pollution, all requiring federal approval; that accumulation has been cut by half.

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 in all of 1970, but nearly one a day by 1978. Under EPA pressure, corporate dumping of toxic wastes into the Gulf of Mexico has dropped from an authorized 1.4 million tons in 1973 to zero.

One 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 Neil, 14, and J.J., 8, and Daughter Stephanie, 12, Gorsuch often works nights and weekends and conveys boundless energy.

But Gorsuch's message is even more controversial than the messenger. Says one senior Administration appointee: "The mandate of the laws that the Congress charged the EPA with administering is fundamentally at odds with what the Reagan Administration wants to do. And that, to understate the matter, has put Anne Gorsuch in a hot spot." Some Republicans think that hamstringing EPA could present Democrats with a potent political issue. Worries Indiana Republican Joel Deckard, ranking minority member of the House Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources: "We can't afford to have the EPA dismantled. We can't even afford the perception. That is an emotional issue that could give us trouble, I mean real trouble, in the next election."

Gorsuch's major ally in her war against the EPA is business, which by EPA estimates has spent $70 billion or more on pollution control in the eleven years since the agency started bringing lawsuits and unwelcome publicity. Gorsuch signaled her sympathy when she gave top EPA jobs to lawyers or lobbyists for General Motors, Exxon, the American Paper Institute, the Business Roundtable, the Adolph Coors Brewing Company and Dow Chemical (makers of the EPA-banned herbicide 2,4,5-T). But even some quarters of industry are growing dubious about the ultimate value of Gorsuch's approach. They fear that the EPA's retreat toward impotence will encourage companies to cancel pollution controls, eventually triggering a public backlash and bringing on even more stringent controls.

Unwavering, Gorsuch reminds her critics that she has the strongest ally in politics. Says she: "I work for the President, and will continue to give him my best appraisal of how his environmental program can be carried out." Despite all the heat, the Ice Queen shows no signs of melting.

--By William A. Henry III. Reported by Gary Lee/Washington

With reporting by Gary Lee

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