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.