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The numbers are telling. The total on the payroll of the agency was nearly 14,075 when Reagan took office. For the current fiscal year, Gorsuch's budget has only 10,396. In the area of hazardous waste enforcement, figures show a personnel drop from 311 in 1981 to 75 in 1983, with the budget plummeting from $11.4 million to $2.3 million over the same period. Moreover, although Gorsuch often says she wants the financially strapped states to contribute more to cleanup efforts, her proposed 1984 budget slashes state grants by 26%, from $233 million to $172 million. In fiscal 1980, the last full year of President Carter's Administration, 200 civil cases against air and water polluters were referred by the EPA to the Justice Department. Last year 100 were referred. The number of both chemical-company and hazardous-waste-facility inspections has fallen sharply. Efforts to enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act have virtually ceased.
Republicans, already concerned that a foot-dragging EPA would present the Democrats with a potent political issue, found last week's developments distressing. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont was beating the drums. "We can enforce our environmental laws or ignore them," he railed. "Thus far, the Administration has done everything pos sible to ignore them." Scheuer said he plans to introduce legislation this week to restructure the EPA as an agency run by an independent commission, apart from the Executive Branch.
In her home town of Denver over the weekend, Gorsuch remained poised in the face of these new challenges. She reiterated her pledge to go to jail if necessary in resisting Congress's call for documents, though over the weekend intense negotiations were going on to end the confrontation. Stanley Brand, the lawyer representing the House in the dispute, warned that Gorsuch is on much shakier ground now. "We're not going to take some peekaboo deal," he said. How much more heat is the Ice Queen prepared to take? Said she, with a sweet smile: "Lots of it. I don't melt at the first macho scream, and I'm not melting now."
—By Maureen Dowd. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington