Superfund

Despite the long duration past cleanups, Superfund is within sight of completing the construction of cleanup remedies at most of the sites on the National Priorities List. However, management problems and cost control issues that GAO has cited for years persist. Because few sites have been admitted to the program in recent years, the pipeline for the List is clearing out. On the other hand, many sites in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) inventory of potential List sites still need attention and possible cleanup, but EPA and the states have postponed decisions, sometimes for up to 10 years or longer, on how to address them. During the past two decades, states have strengthened their capacity to deal with site cleanups to varying degrees. Some have substantial programs, while others claim to have little ability to pay for cleanups. Moreover, not all of the states have adequate enforcement authority to force responsible parties to pay for cleanups. Because the states now have the lead for screening sites for List consideration, future List sites could disproportionately represent complex cleanups for which responsible parties cannot be found or are unwilling to ante up the full cleanup cost. GAO recommends that EPA work with the states to assign responsibility among themselves for these sites. The Superfund reauthorization process gives Congress an opportunity to help guide EPA and the states in allocating responsibility for dealing with these sites.

GAO noted that: (1) in the past GAO has called attention to the slow pace of cleanups in the Superfund program; (2) however, 17 years after sites were first placed on the Superfund list, many of the sites have progressed a considerable distance through the cleanup process; (3) decisions about how to clean up the great majority of these sites have been made, and the construction and cleanup remedies have been completed at over 40 percent of the sites; (4) the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) goal is to complete the construction of remedies at 1,200 sites by 2005; (5) work to clean up groundwater will continue at many sites after remedies are constructed; (6) despite the progress that Superfund has made toward site cleanups, certain management problems persist; (7) these problems include the: (a) difficulty in controlling contract costs; (b) failure to recover certain federal cleanup costs from the parties who are responsible for the contaminated sites; and (c) selection of sites for cleanup without assurance that they are the most dangerous sites to human health and the environment; (8) these problems have caused GAO to include the program on its list of federal programs vulnerable to waste and abuse; (9) furthermore, GAO's analysis indicates that the costs of on-site work by cleanup contractors represent less than half of the spending in the program; (10) there is considerable uncertainty about the future workload of the Superfund program; (11) resolving this uncertainty depends largely on deciding how to divide responsibility for the cleanup of sites between EPA and the states; (12) the number of sites that have entered the Superfund program in recent years has decreased as EPA has focused its resources on completing work at existing sites and the states have developed their own programs for cleaning up sites; (13) according to EPA and state officials who responded to the survey, a large number of sites in EPA's inventory of potential Superfund sites are contaminating groundwater and drinking water sources and causing other problems and may need cleanup; (14) GAO recommended that EPA work with the states to assign responsibility for these sites among themselves; and (15) the Superfund reauthorization process gives Congress an opportunity to help guide EPA and the states in allocating responsibility for addressing these sites.