Superfund

Critics have raised concerns about Superfund contractors' excessive spending of public money on activities that do not advance the cleanup of hazardous waste sites. These concerns have focused on the high administrative and management costs incurred by contractors in the Alternative Remedial Contracting Strategy. GAO found that inaction on the part of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has contributed to high program management costs for such contracts. These high costs arose in part because EPA awarded a large number of contracts and built in excess contract workload capacity to allow the agency to terminate contractors that performed poorly and to prevent future capacity shortages. The cleanup workload shortages EPA envisioned never materialized, however, in part because of a decision to have private parties responsible for site contamination manage and pay for cleanups. To minimize program management costs, GAO recommends that EPA analyze such contracts to determine whether terminating some of them would be more cost-effective than continuing to pay program management costs for the remaining life of underutilized contracts. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Superfund: EPA Action Could Have Minimized Program Management Costs, by Richard L. Hembra, Director of Environmental Protection Issues, before the Subcommittee on Superfund, Recycling, and Solid Waste Management, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. GAO/T-RCED-93-50, June 10, 1993 (16 pages).

GAO found that: (1) ARCS program management costs have exceeded EPA projections; (2) although EPA was aware of high ARCS program management costs as early as October 1989, it did not initiate action to correct the problem until the beginning of fiscal year 1992; (3) in some regions, there is significant excess contract capacity that could ultimately cost the government millions of dollars in unnecessary program management costs; (4) EPA is developing new clean-up contracts, known as Response Action Contracts (RAC), that will supplement and eventually replace ARCS contracts as they expire; (5) EPA has prepared work-load forecasts to estimate contracting needs, ensure the continuity of clean-up work after ARCS contracts expire, and help control program management costs; (6) EPA is designing RAC with features to address key ARCS contract deficiencies; (7) detailed cost breakdowns and a new award fee process should make it easier for EPA to monitor and control program costs; (8) major policy initiatives, such as the Superfund Accelerated Cleanup Model (SACM), to help expedite cleanups and Superfund reauthorization may affect RAC contracting needs; and (9) the usefulness of RAC depends on EPA ability to respond to changing contracting needs and coordinate the development and implementation of SACM.

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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