Superfund

Federal agencies own and operate many facilities--everything from research laboratories to landfills to nuclear weapons plants--potentially contaminated with hazardous waste. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not met its statutory deadlines for evaluating such facilities and deciding whether to enroll them in the Superfund program. By the end of 1992, EPA had finished evaluating only 500 of 823 potentially contaminated facilities. At its current pace, the agency may take more than a decade to finish evaluating and placing facilities on the National Priorities List. EPA missed its deadlines mainly because it did not place a high enough priority on assessing and evaluating federal facilities. EPA and other federal agencies never established a joint plan for responding to the mandates. EPA began to devote more resources and attention to federal facilities only after a 1991 court order. In addition, some federal agencies have given short shrift to environmental issues and have contributed to delays by giving EPA late or incomplete facility assessments.

GAO found that: (1) as of December 1992, EPA had evaluated 500 of the 823 potentially contaminated facilities on the docket; (2) the backlog of unevaluated federal facilities could result in an increased risk to public health and the environment or expensive rework if agencies do their own cleanup and are later required by EPA to perform additional cleanup; (3) there is no way to estimate how many federal facilities EPA will include on the National Priorities List (NPL); (4) EPA does not know whether unevaluated facilities are more or less contaminated than those already evaluated; (5) EPA concluded in 1987 that it could not meet the legislative deadlines because of resource limitations; and (6) some federal agencies do not view hazardous waste cleanup programs as a high priority and sometimes provide EPA with late or incomplete assessments.

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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