Operation Save EPA: Why — and how — EPA staffers leaked documents during the Reagan administrati

Former President Ronald Reagan’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Anne Gorsuch, believed that the agency could carry out its duties with a much smaller budget and in a way that interfered less with industry.

But many on her staff thought her approach undermined the mission of the agency: to protect the environment and public health. So they worked with other Washington insiders to leak documents and stir up controversy.

The second episode of “Captured” looks at how critics both in and outside of the agency plotted to turn up the political heat on Gorsuch and the Reagan administration — and how the serious business of environmental regulation even ended up in the funny pages.

Full episode transcript

Scott Tong: If you know Washington, D.C., you may have stumbled across this playground: Turtle Park. It’s been around forever in this nice, leafy neighborhood by American University. And as playgrounds go, I give it an eight, maybe maybe a nine. Mini-slide, swings, monkey bars, playhouse with a mailbox. It’s a big upgrade from 1981, when an unassuming looking mom would come with her 4-year-old boy.

Caroline Isber: The playground had sand and there were concrete turtles.

Tong: Hence the name Turtle Park.

Isber: And he was jumping off the turtles and building sand castles and running around and meeting other children. 

Tong: That’s Caroline Isber. She’s a retired environmental policy expert. Back then, she says Turtle Park was a good spot for playdates — and a good rendez-vous point to get inside information.

Tong: And so sometimes who would come to visit you? In some cases, was it people from the EPA, which is pretty far from here?

Isber: Well, they were happy to come. They wanted to get together and I’d say, ‘Meet me in the playground.’

Tong: ‘Meet me in the playground’ — to plot. To fight. To resist. See, Caroline worked environment issues in the Carter White House. And in the early ‘80s, she helps to start this insurgent group. It’s called Save EPA. And Save EPA is meant to stop efforts by the Reagan administration to shrink the agency, or, in her view, to destroy it.

Isber: We thought that the environment was very much under attack. And so the question was,