She did her part, cutting her agency’s budget by 22 percent, curtailing research and enforcement activities and scaling back regulations on air and water pollution. (Carbon dioxide and climate change, the most contentious issues facing the EPA today, weren’t yet on anyone’s agenda.) She even attempted to relax limits, imposed in the 1970s, on lead additives to gasoline, regulations that are credited now with preventing the poisoning of large numbers of children. A New York Times editorial in 1983 said she had taken one of the most effective government agencies and left it “reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”