Environment
See also: Environmental policy of the United States#The Reagan Administration (1980-1988)Reagan dismissed proposals to halt acid rain finding them burdensome to industry. The Environmental Protection Agency implored Reagan to make a major budget commitment to reduce acid rain; Reagan rejected the proposal and deemed it as wasteful government spending. He also questioned scientific evidence on the causes of acid rain. It was later discovered that the administration was releasing Superfund grants for cleaning up local toxic waste sites to enhance the election prospects of local officials aligned with the Republican Party. Reagan rarely thought about the environment in political terms, however, and did not fear that his popularity would be damaged by environmental issues. In 1981, Reagan even removed the solar panels that his predecessor Carter had installed on the roof of the White House’s West Wing. "Reagan's political philosophy viewed the free market as the best arbiter of what was good for the country. Corporate self-interest, he felt, would steer the country in the right direction," the author Natalie Goldstein wrote in "Global Warming.". In October 2010, president Obama planned to reintroduce the solar panels on the White House roofs, after 31 years.
The HUD controversy involved administration staffers granting federal funding to constituents, and defrauding the U.S. government out of money intended for low income housing. It resulted in six convictions, including James G. Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior. Watt was indicted on 24 felony counts and pled guilty to a single misdemeanor. He was sentenced to five years probation, and ordered to pay a $5000 fine.
Read more about this topic: Domestic Policy Of The Ronald Reagan Administration
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)