Water Pollution

Groundwater supplies about 40 percent of the American people with their drinking water, is used extensively by agriculture and industry, and supports sensitive surface water ecosystems. Once groundwater is contaminated, it is extremely expensive and difficult, if not impossible, to clean up. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new groundwater strategy includes initiatives--involving financial and technical assistance--to help states establish comprehensive groundwater protection programs. The strategy underscores the need to prevent groundwater contamination and stresses attainment of a greater balance between prevention and remediation activities. Nevertheless, the potential for success in implementing the new approach is limited by some of the same barriers that restricted earlier EPA efforts to prevent groundwater contamination. Most state and regional officials are concerned that while EPA's new approach appears to emphasize prevention, it is not accompanied by a meaningful shift in funding priorities. Without such a shift, it will be hard for the agency to provide more assistance to help states establish groundwater programs, and to improve its own management and accountability systems to effectively measure and track progress in protecting groundwater.

GAO found that: (1) the groundwater contamination prevention strategy EPA designed in 1984 has made limited progress due to ineffective agency coordination of policies and programs, ineffective management and accountability systems, and priorities and resource allocations that favored remediation rather than prevention; (2) states maintained that EPA provided inadequate grant assistance and technical guidance for their efforts to prevent and clean up contamination; (3) EPA finalized a new strategy in July 1991 and is taking steps to establish mechanisms to improve program coordination and policy integration, improve management and accountability systems, improve annual groundwater activity planning and evaluation, and collect additional state groundwater data; (4) the new strategy more clearly defines EPA policy and places more emphasis on prevention activities and a comprehensive approach for managing groundwater resources; (5) the continued heavy orientation of available funds on remedial rather than preventive activities and the generally limited availability of resources will continue to limit progress in implementing the strategy; (6) while the new strategy includes initiatives for increasing financial and technical assistance for states, it is unlikely that EPA will be able to provide all of the needed assistance; and (7) EPA may be able to obtain further financial assistance for preventive activities by shifting groundwater-related grants initially intended for remedial activities to preventive activities.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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