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Anne Gorsuch Burford, 62, Dies; Reagan EPA Director
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Aug 06, 2006 07:28pm |
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| Category | Obituary |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Friday, July 23, 2004 01:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Washington Post article.
An excerpt...
"Anne M. Gorsuch Burford, 62, the Environmental Protection Agency director who resigned under fire in 1983 during a scandal over mismanagement of a $1.6 billion program to clean up hazardous waste dumps, died of cancer July 18 at Aurora Medical Center in Colorado.
Her 22-month tenure was one of the most controversial of the early Reagan administration. A firm believer that the federal government, and specifically the EPA, was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, Ms. Burford cut her agency's budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.
Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budgets cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.
Ms. Burford was forced to resign after she was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over Superfund records, arguing that they were protected by executive privilege. Ms. Burford acted under President Ronald Reagan's orders, with the advice of the Justice Department and against her own recommendation, her colleagues told the press at the time. A few months later, in what one of her aides called a "cold-blooded, treacherous act of political callousness," the Justice Department announced it would no longer represent her because it was involved in investigations into corruption at the EPA." |
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