Fred Smith, a former EPA employee who criticized government regulations and launched a conservative think tank from his kitchen, died last month. He was 83.
Smith died at his home on Nov. 23 after an acute illness, according to a notice published in The Washington Post.
Born in Alabama and raised in Louisiana, Smith landed in Washington as a senior policy analyst at EPA. There, he “became disillusioned with central planning and technocratic approaches,” his wife, Fran Smith, said in a 2013 video.
In 1984, Fred Smith launched the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank with the stated mission to “reform America’s unaccountable regulatory state.” The organization’s “first offices were in Fred and Fran’s kitchen,” the group says on its website.
