Salon: Jumping Ship at the EPA

[kskiska]

The Bush administration has a plan to get rid of the senior career staff at EPA -- and it's working.

When John Suarez, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's top enforcement official, resigned on Monday to take a job at a Wal-Mart division, he assured his colleagues and President Bush that the EPA has "been able to provide more compliance assistance to industry than ever before." The operative wording here, of course, is "assistance to industry," seeing as Suarez played a key role in the notorious decision by the Bush administration to scrap lawsuits against dozens of coal-burning utilities for past dirty-air infringements under the New Source Review provision of the Clean Air Act -- one of the biggest and most controversial enforcement lapses in the agency's history.

To make the situation even more absurd, Suarez concluded his resignation letter by saying, "I can assure you that the enforcement and compliance efforts are in good hands at EPA." Apparently, he failed to notice that there are a fast-dwindling number of good hands after an exodus of senior talent from the EPA over the holidays, including the unexpected retirement of two top-level career employees in the agency's enforcement division just weeks before Suarez's own announcement. Bruce Buckheit, who had served in the EPA through six presidential administrations, and his deputy, Richard Biondi, both retired with clear signs of indignation about the Bush administration's disregard for their positions.

"I just didn't feel comfortable working in that environment anymore," Biondi told Muckraker from his home soon after his resignation. "Certainly the direction that the agency was going over the last couple years was different than what I'd experienced during my 32 years working for EPA. It was contrary to everything that I had worked for."

Buckheit, who was director of the EPA's air enforcement division, is on extended holiday travel and could not be reached, but made strong statements to Greenwire just before his departure: "This new enforcement policy will stop almost all work in the power plant enforcement world," he said. "If there was any interesting and useful work in the power plant sector, I'd still be ."

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/01/08/epa/index.html