Superfund Not Funded, Congressional Investigator Reports

WASHINGTON, DC, February 23, 2004 (ENS) - The U.S. Congress is failing to fully fund the Superfund program, according to a new analysis by the General Accounting Office (GAO). The investigative arm of Congress states in its report that appropriations for the nation's primary hazardous waste clean up program, when adjusted for inflation, have fallen some 35 percent or $633 million since 1993.

"This analysis shows just how far backward we have moved in cleaning up toxic waste sites," said Senator James Jeffords, a Vermont Independent. "How can we explain to the one in four Americans who live within four miles of a Superfund site that making their community cleaner is not a priority?"

Seventy million people, including some 10 million children, live within four miles of the nation's more than 1,230 Superfund sites. Children are most vulnerable to the arsenic, DDT and brain damaging toxics like lead and mercury that are found in the water and soil at these locations.

According to the analysis released Thursday by the GAO, funding for clean up of these sites has fallen from more than $1.9 billion in 1993 to some $1.2 billion in 2004 in inflation adjusted dollars.

Jeffords and California Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, requested the updated analysis from the GAO.

Cleaning up Superfund sites is often a long and costly process. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Started in 1980 as a relatively short term project to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites, the Superfund program has expanded as tens of thousands of waste sites have been discovered.

Many of these sites are owned by the federal government, and cleaning them up has proved to be far more complicated and costly than anticipated. But the sites that are not owned by the federal government are to either be cleaned up by the private parties responsible for contamination or by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is then tasked with seeking reimbursement from those responsible.

Congress created a trust fund to pay for cleanups of nongovernment sites and devised "polluter pays fees" to fund it. These fees consisted of a corporate tax that applies to profits of large corporations in excess of $2 million, a fee on the purchase of harmful chemicals and a fee on the purchase of crude oil by refineries.

The polluter pays provision expired in 1995, when the trust fund was at a historic high of some $3.6 billion.

But the trust fund is now empty and failure to revive the polluter pays tax has increased the share of the share of the program's costs carried by the federal government from 18 percent in 1995 to 100 percent.

The Bush administration opposes reinstating the fees unless reforms of cleanup standards and polluters' liabilities are enacted, a position environmentalists say mirrors that of industry. But Congress has also failed to act - last year a measure to reinstate the provision failed.

"It is time to reauthorize the Superfund fees on polluters and get the program moving again," said Jeffords, who has signed on as a sponsor to the bill authored by Boxer to reinstate the tax.

The drop in funding is having a direct impact on cleanup, critics say.

In the middle and late 1990s, Superfund cleaned up an average of 86 sites per year, but this number has fallen by more than 50 percent in the last two years.

The EPA completed work at only 40 sites in fiscal year 2003, compared to the 87 cleanups achieved in the last year of the Clinton administration.

Some 85 percent of all Superfund sites have contaminated groundwater. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

They contend the budget for the Superfund program goes to much more than just cleanup, including emergency removals, site assessment, site cleanup, enforcement, and administration.

A study by the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future says the Superfund program needs annual funding of between $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. Using these figures, critics say the Bush administration has under funded the Superfund program by some $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion from 2001 through 2004.

This means that some 522 Superfund sites in 48 states and the U.S. territories - representing 42 percent of all Superfund sites - may be subject to a delayed cleanup or less stringent EPA oversight of cleanup activities conducted by polluters, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

For fiscal year 2005 the White House has requested a $1.4 billion for Superfund - a $124 million increase compared to 2004 appropriations.

But this has not appeased Congressional critics. Internal EPA memos, recently released by the National Environmental Trust, indicate agency officials are also concerned that funding shortfalls are undermining the Superfund program.

"This report proves that the administration has drastically cut funding for Superfund," Boxer said. "The 14 million Californians who live within four miles of a Superfund site are being harmed - perhaps irreparably - as a result of this callous policy. I will fight hard to reverse this dangerous course."