Il controverso rapporto fra Presidente e Presidenza: Ronald Reagan e la gestione delle politiche ambientali

The History of US public administration can be analyzed from two parallel standpoints: on the one hand it is possible to observe the historical development of institutional practices and rules strictly related to the President and his range of executive action; on the other, it is possible to follow the process of administrative reforms that occurred to the apparatuses and bureaucracies belonging to the executive branch, often referred to as Presidency. The institutional relationship between the President and the Presidency is therefore one of the crucial points in understanding the complexity of the US constitutional system, since it may also include the intervention of the two other branches of government, legislative and judiciary. This essay aims at examining the topic of presidential relations within the executive branch by taking into consideration the peculiar case of Ronald Reagan presidency and the administrative reforms carried out during his mandate, with specific regard to the management of environmental policies. During the 1980s, driven by the energy crisis of the previous decade, the problems relating to air pollution and the impact of carbon emissions on health of citizens entered fully into the political agenda of the Western states, becoming eventually the object of specific international agreements. Despite the total absence of environment topics in his reform agenda, mainly focused on the re-launch of the economy and industrial recovery, the conservative-republican President Ronald Reagan was inevitably forced to confront with the raising international awareness on the topic of environmental protection, whilst trying at the same time to resist the web of federal rules and apparatuses addressing the issue, which had the potential to jeopardize his economic plans. The analysis of the relationship between the President and the Presidency in the management of environmental issues, still not thoroughly examined in the literature, may shed light to new insights as to the effective space for discretionary action of the American President at the end of the 1900s.