The New Yorker:

With the help of the agency, the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make emissions grow again.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

The first person to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created by President Richard Nixon, in late 1970, was an up-and-coming Republican politician named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus, known to his friends as Ruck, came from Indiana, where, during a single term in the state’s House of Representatives, he had managed to get elected majority leader. On being chosen to lead the E.P.A., he moved quickly to establish the new agency’s credibility. Just a week into his tenure, he warned the cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Atlanta that they could be sued for polluting their own waterways, and over the next few months he took action against several major corporations, including U.S. Steel. In an interview with Time a year into the job, Ruckelshaus described his strategy as focussing on the “violators with the greatest visibility in order to get the message across.” He likened the task of getting the agency organized while at the same time pursuing polluters to “trying to run a hundred-yard dash while undergoing an appendectomy.”

Since Ruckelshaus, the E.P.A. has had, depending on how you count, fifteen or sixteen more chiefs. Several of them have been, to put it politely, clunkers. Ronald Reagan’s first pick for the post, Anne Gorsuch (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother), implemented deep budget cuts, tanked staff morale, and ended up getting cited for contempt of Congress. (To clean up her mess, Reagan called Ruckelshaus back; hence the kink in the count.) Donald Trump’s first E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, produced an even bigger—or, at least, more bizarre—public-relations debacle. He was investigated for, among other things, charging the agency for first-class flights, travelling with a security detail to Disneyland, and installing a soundproof “privacy booth” in his office at a cost to taxpayers of more than forty thousand dollars. When he resigned, in the summer of 2018, Carlos Curbelo, then a Republican congressman from Florida, called Pruitt’s tenure “an embarrassment.”

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