Salon: The EPA's revolving door

[kskiska]

Yet another high-level leader at the Environmental Protection Agency has decided to throw in the towel. Is a heavy-handed Bush White House to blame?

The language is increasingly familiar: "I'm leaving at this time in order to spend more quality time with my family ... I realize that I need to devote more time and energy to being wife and mom."

Yep, another beleaguered Bush appointee at the U.S. EPA bites the dust. Christine Todd Whitman flew the coop last spring, and this week one of her right-hand women -- Marianne Lamont Horinko, the assistant EPA administrator for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response -- announced that she will follow suit on June 1.

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"This is the first time that we've had a president and a solid-waste director who were not supportive of reinstating the Superfund tax," said Elkus. "Marianne just spouted the party line -- saying the tax unfairly penalized the good guys along with bad guys. She just seemed to watch from the sidelines without objection as taxpayers increasingly footed the bill for Superfund cleanup, and as the listings of new sites dwindled."

It was also Horinko who, as head of EPA's emergency efforts, led the agency's response to the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center -- and who awkwardly deflected (and never managed to fully refute) accusations that the EPA failed to release critical data about potentially dangerous air quality at ground zero.

But according to the D.C. rumor mill, the straw that finally broke Horinko's back came just last week when she testified before a House Energy and Commerce Air Quality Subcommittee hearing in support of the Pentagon's assertion that it needs to be exempted from environmental regulations, which it says are hamstringing combat preparations. In this, she contradicted testimony made a year ago by Whitman, who said she knew of no examples in which environmental laws had impeded the military's readiness.

Some observers believe Horinko was put in an awkward position, forced to support Pentagon claims for which her own agency has found no evidence. "Her performance was uncharacteristically abysmal," said one environmentalist who attended the hearings and spoke on condition of anonymity. "She is usually very well spoken, but this time she was visibly flustered and stepping on her words. She looked like she was getting an enema."

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/04/30/muck_epa/index.html