Duty and discretion in a wayward agency: The U.S. environmental protection agency implementation of the hazardous waste laws

In the early 1980s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Anne (Gorsuch) Burford became a battleground between President Reagan's appointees and the career civil servants. The new administration wanted to ease the regulatory burden, cooperate with industry, and reduce inflationary costs. The civil servants wanted to continue the existing policies of the Carter administration, or as they saw it, to implement the laws. The hazardous waste program, headed by Rita Lavelle, serves as a case study of the tension between the agency's duty (to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act) and the administrative discretion to carry out President Reagan's policy.