Nearly all of the former administrators of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gathered in Washington today to celebrate the agency’s 35th anniversary. (The EPA’s actual DOB was Dec. 2, 1970.)
It was an impressive group, ranging from the first EPA leader, William D. Ruckelshaus, to the current head, Stephen L. Johnson. But one absentee, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, probably had more flair and panache than all of the other nine administrators combined.
A tough-talking Wyoming native and former Colorado legislator, Gorsuch (her name when she ran EPA from 1981 to 1983) was the only administrator forced to resign as a result of a Washington scandal. When Congress demanded EPA documents for its investigation of corruption in the Superfund program, Gorsuch – under orders from President Reagan – refused to comply and left town.
A year later, after Reagan offered her a compensatory post on a federal advisory commission, Gorsuch responded with a now famous quote calling the nation’s capital “too small to be a state but too large to be an asylum for the mentally deranged.”
Gorsuch also offered a pithy description of EPA in an article she wrote for the agency’s 15th anniversary in 1985:
“Paradoxically, waste represents both EPA’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness: we have done a fine job of cleaning it up, but a poor job of preventing it. That is EPA’s challenge for the future.”
And one that still remains.
Nearly all of the former administrators of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gathered in Washington today to celebrate the agency’s 35th anniversary. (The EPA’s actual DOB was Dec. 2, 1970.)
It was an impressive group, ranging from the first EPA leader, William D. Ruckelshaus, to the current head, Stephen L. Johnson. But one absentee, the late Anne Gorsuch Burford, probably had more flair and panache than all of the other nine administrators combined.
