This Ice Queen Does Not Melt

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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."