"Government isn't the solution," Ronald Reagan regularly intoned before coming to Washington. "Government is the problem." The Government, went his litany, was bloated with "waste, fraud and abuse," all of which desperately needed purging. His words proved prophetic, though not precisely in the way he intended: his Administration, from its very beginning, has been riddled from top to bottom with allegations of impropriety and corruption.
More than 100 members of the Reagan Administration have had ethical or legal charges leveled against them. That number is without precedent. While the Reagan Administration's missteps may not have been as flagrant as the Teapot Dome scandal or as pernicious as Watergate, they seem more general, more pervasive and somehow more ingrained than those of any previous Administration. During other presidencies, scandals such as Watergate seemed to multiply from a single cancer; the Reagan Administration, however, appears to have suffered a breakdown of the immune system, opening the way to all kinds of ethical and moral infections.
Perhaps part of the reason for many of the Administration's sundry collisions with the law is that it is operating under a new set of rules: it is the first to be covered from the start by the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. Yet to a large degree it is the very ideology of the President and his Administration that seems to encourage a climate of abuse. Reagan appointees have tended to share a common philosophy about government: less is better, none is best. Many appear to have come to Washington with an innate disrespect for its institutions and a disregard for the rules that govern them.
The fallen Reagan Administration officials fit into some broad categories. There are the Foxes in the Chicken Coop: those appointed to enforce regulations they chafed under while in the private sector and who, once in office, seemed eager to undermine them. There are the Public-Service Privateers: appointees from the business world who carried their Wall Street ethos into the public sector. The True Believers: officials whose loyalty and ambition overcame their judgment and principles. And People with a Past: officials undone by acts committed before entering government.
When Reagan appointees took control of various agencies, they sometimes sabotaged the institutions -- from the top. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Burford and more than a dozen of her senior aides resigned in the face of a variety of charges, including one that they had deliberately ignored environmental violations by chemical companies whose officials they were chummy with. For them the agency was the problem, not the solution; their remedy was to create the kind of chemistry that would neutralize it.